Spam rating your newsletter

How to keep your newsletter out of the spam box

[markbaa]

Like many of you, I have a newsletter which I sent out to opt-in customers of my website. And, no doubt like many of you, my newsletter gets picked up by some spam filters.

Of course I want to keep my email out of the spam filters and into the inbox. I've heard rumours of software which will assess your newsletter before it is sent and make recommendations of changes you can make to copy and to HTML in order to reduce the chances of being flagged.

Does anyone have any experience with this? Any software/services you would recommend? Do they actually work?

[lammert]

You can send a draft of your newsletter to a mail server with SpamAssassin installed. This spam filter software is a free Apache project. It checks mail messages against a number of rules, and writes a header in the messages which indicates which problems have been found.

Many mail servers use SpamAssassin or a spam filter system based around a similar set of rules. So if your newsletter passes SpamAssassin without warnings, it should pass many spam filters without problems.