Content Tips for Copywriters & Designers
Writing a better Unsubscribe
 Tips for the more Technically-Inclined
Tips for Marketers
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These tips pertain primarily to your email infrastructure. If you are not mailing from in-house, ensure your external email delivery provider is complying with these basic rules. If you are a Pivotal Veracity client, you can use your eContent Scorer analysis to verify both internal and external resources as all of these checks are performed automatically in the scoring process.
Act now to eliminate Open Relays
If you are mailing from a server with open relays, you are providing an open invitation for spammers to hijack your identity via a 3rd party relay. Additionally, you risk being added to Black Lists (which list open relay servers in addition to known or suspected spammers) and being blocked by ISPs simply because you have open relays.
Enable Reverse DNS Lookup
If reverse DNS is enabled, it allows the ISP to verify that the sending IP Address corresponds with a domain name. While most the large ISPs will not stop your mail if reverse DNS lookup is not enabled, they will potentially flag your mail as suspect. The risk of blockage gets higher as the ISP or corporation gets smaller.
Minimize Relaying Between Servers Before Sending Out Messages
Relaying messages between servers is a common spammer trick. Some marketers relay messages between internal servers or those within their control prior to dispatching the message. Since ISPs use multiple relay as a way to identify spammers, you want to minimize, if not avoid all together, relaying between multiple servers.
Use Accurate, Complete & Correctly Formatted Message Headers
Spammers forge just about everything they can in the email header. Thus, the rule of thumb here is to follow all internet standards and ensure all information contained in your email headers are accurate. If your header does not conform to Internet standards or the headers look suspicious there is a high risk your email will be tagged as spam. Some examples of suspicious headers include, a date set more than 24-48 hours in the future or past or a misconfigured time zone. Missing To: or From: headers can also cause a message to be marked as spam.
Use a Secure Version of FormMail
FormMail is one of the most widely used perl scripts on the web. It lets sites process Web-based forms such as an e-mail contact page. There is a flaw in FormMail which spammers can exploit to send massive amounts of bulk e-mail, obscuring their real identity and location in the process. If you are using FormMail make sure it is a secure version. A site where you can download patches: http://www.scriptarchive.com/formmail.php
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