Store auto-reply tripping Yahoo spam filter

[flyerguy]

MY shopping cart uses IIS6 CDO to send an automatic email to my customers when their purchase has been authorized at my payment provider, with download instructions for my digital products.

Every week or so, I get the most annoying emails from Yahoo users.. "where's my download! im going to cancel my payment! yada yada".

It really bothers me as I pride myself on treating customers great, and people get downright obnoxious..

The emails are sent in plain-text. Here is the text of it, is there perhaps a Yahoo spam filter stop-word in here or could it be that my emails are sent from a '[e-mail]' address? :

____

Dear Customer Name,

Thank you for your order. Your Paypal payment has been received.

You may now login into your Account and download your file(s) by clicking 'Orders', then clicking your order number: 55555

You can access this receipt page directly from this link:

http://www.domain.com/receipt.asp?orderid=55555

You may view this receipt and access your downloads for as long as you have an account with us.

Please feel free to contact us at anytime if you have any questions regarding this or any other order by visiting customer support located at:

http://www.domain.com/default.asp?pg=contact

Please remember the following:
We respect your privacy! We will not share any information about you with any other organization at any time. Ever. See our Privacy Policy and Refunds/Returns page here:
http://www.domain.com/privacy

For your convenience, you may track your order, edit your Account, or view any of your past orders through your Account page, here:
http://www.domain.com/default.asp?pg=extranet

Order 555555 placed: 5/2/2005 5:36:54 AM
____

[edited by: lorax at 12:25 am (utc) on May 4, 2005]
[edit reason] delinked [/edit]

[Longhaired Genius]

On your order page, I would say:

We are going to send you an important email. If you have not received it within an hour, please check your spam-folder. If it is not there, please make sure email from us is whitelisted, then contact us and we will resend it.

You may have to reword this to suit your customer base. This is what a knowledgeable person would do under the circumstances. There's very little you can do about the bad behaviour of others on the web. All you can do is behave properly yourself and try to educate your customers.

[sun818]

Your e-mail can be considered spammy because it has too many links. Run your outgoing e-mails to your spam filter and see what kind of flag it triggers. You may need to work on the actual structure of the e-mail (i.e. having a name with the From address) and testing for keywords in the content.

[Raymond]

If you are using CDONT to send out emails, all your emails will be caught by the spam filters in Hotmail and Yahoo. I have tested this with many different email formats, (including legitimate email messages from emails my friends sent me). There is no other way around this.

[flyerguy]

I'm using CDO specifically, not CDONTS (CDO is the newer version, I think?).

I can't say that hotmail is being caught, only it seems Yahoo users. I have a fair number of hotmail customers that don't seem to have a problem.

The thing is, I get Yahoo customers that write in to complain about not getting download instructions, then I reply to their email from my sales@ account, via Outlook, and they don't get that message either.

So they send another, angrier email saying 'you don't give me download instructions, you don't respond to my emails, what kind of company are you, etc.'.

It takes replying from another email account for them to finally get my response.

Yahoo is really annoying me! I could reduce the number of links the auto-message, only the download link is essential.. it's really strange that they don't get my personal responses though, could it be that once an email address is considered a 'spammer' to yahoo's filters, all further messages are blocked?

"If you are using CDONT to send out emails, all your emails will be caught by the spam filters in Hotmail and Yahoo."

[sharbel]

Make sure the server you are sending the messages from, has a PTR record (reverse DNS)... Yahoo and AOL look for that. I was getting a lot of mail not delivered for one of my webservices until I had my server host create a PTR record for the server.