SE Conspiracy

I learned very early on that email not getting through spam filters would be a major hindrance to my online businesses. Unfortunately, free email providers have cracked down so much that hardly anything gets through those filters now. If you are a legitimate business that has NEVER even once sent spam, your emails probably still end up in the ‘Bulk Mail’ folders at Yahoo and Gmail. It’s sad but true. MSN/Hotmail tends to be a little more realistic -as of the time of this writing.

I haven’t had the time to keep up on whether my emails were getting through over the past several years, and I just now made the time to overhaul my sites in this area.

What did I find?

Well, *gulp* I found that my forum has discarded roughly 25 registrations per month that did not see our email. One of my other businesses that caters to people who mostly use free email services have lost an estimated $500/month due to abandoned confirmations. Still, another one of my companies has lost its ability to generate any revenue due to emails not getting through. That company was actually “spam trap poisoned” -meaning that someone put in special emails used to catch spammers who continuously send spam to emails they shouldn’t. These are emails such as “donotspamthisemail@groups.yahoo.com.”

Basically, a “spam trap” was a good idea in the beginning. It was an email designed to be picked up by email harvesters (automated programs that crawl the web collecting email addresses from websites), and when the spammer would spam that email, the group would automatically submit a request to all of the blocklists and get them shut down fairly quickly.

However, these days, spammers can pick out which email addresses are spam traps and they then turn around and submit those emails into competitor websites. So, in my case, someone kept putting in several “spam trap” emails and when I would send out my double opt-in confirmation emails to it, my site would get tagged for spam. Now, I’ve had to spend considerable time and energy to get removed from those lists.

So, that’s no good. What can we do about it?

Here’s what I did tonight to combat the over zealous spam filters that are killing my legitimate businesses while doing little to curb overall spam:

1. I wrote new code for all of my sites that specifically tells people the exact steps on how to whitelist our email addresses and then provide an alternate way to request the validation email be sent out again.
2. I modified the email code across all of my sites to put a one-click unsubscribe and made it to where I keep the email to avoid re-registrations from people trying to spam trap poison me. I make the email inactive so it will never be emailed, of course.
3. I double-checked the security of my code, website account security, server security, and updated my passwords. This was done to help prevent someone from hacking any of my databases and spamming my users without me even knowing. It has never happened and I want to make sure it stays that way!
4. I applied to the various free email providers and requested to be whitelisted (see below).
5. I will be adding SPF records to my most important domains.
6. I am also considering a service such as Constant Contact for some of my more important lists –although, that will be a bit pricey for my 25,000 subscriber database.

Before you apply for the various whitelists, you should read over their terms to make 100% percent certain that you are compliant. Otherwise, you will waste a LOT of time and get nowhere.

For instance, you might think you are compliant because you don’t spam but it’s not that simple. Typically, you have to have the following:

1. Reverse DNS set up for each domain that sends your emails.
2. Dedicated IP address or you need to identify what methods you take to ensure that you are providing tracking to differentiate your emails from someone else sharing the same IP address.
3. Proof of how you collected your emails. This includes a timestamp, name, and method (i.e. email subscribe, form subscribe, etc)

When you are ready to begin this process, you can visit the following links to read over the guidelines and apply:

1. AOL – AOL Whitelist Guidelines
2. Yahoo! -Yahoo Bulk Email Sender FAQ
3. Gmail – Google Whitelist Policy*

*Google does not allow whitelisting. So, if you want to tell people how to manually whitelist you for their account, use the following steps:

1. Go to http://www.gmail.com and login to your email account
   *just like you would to check your email.
2. At the top RIGHT SIDE, click the link that says SETTINGS.
3. At the top of the screen that says MAIL SETTINGS, click the link that says FILTERS.
4. On the FILTERS screen, click the tab that says Create a New Filter tab.
5. In the FROM field on the CREATE A FILTER screen, type: yourdomain.com
   *Change NO other settings on this screen.
6. Click the button that says NEXT STEP.
7. Check the box that says STAR IT.
8. Click the button that says CREATE FILTER.
9. That’s it! Sign out from Gmail.

Whew! As long as it took to write all of that out, it is nothing compared to how much work this will have been once completed. However, these are some of the ills of working online, and -for some of us- the benefits of being able to work from home are more than worth it!