Spam is unsolicited email or other sources such as SMS or social media messages. Spammers send such mailings to a large number of users without their consent. Usually, the letters offer goods or services of dubious quality.

The easiest solution to send millions of emails without spam is to use dedicated services (like Warmy) that will do all the hard work for you, such as all the settings, gradual warm-up, analytics, and bug fixes. In this case, you do not need to do anything yourself, just connect the mail to such a service.

But if you want to do everything yourself, let’s talk about what conditions you need to fulfill to get a good result.

The word “spam” has an interesting history.

Spam was originally the name of a brand that sold canned food to its soldiers during World War II. After the end of the war, there were a lot of them left and the company began to offer them to people everywhere, as the expiration date was coming to an end.

Now the spam market is growing rapidly, and spam messages are very annoying to people.

Spam is everywhere, in emails, on forums, in comments and messages in all social networks, on the feedback site, in all messengers, and SMS. With the advent of marketing automation, spamming just got bigger and easier and faster. That is why mail services are fighting spam so seriously.

Types of spam:

1. Spam advertising – regular promotional emails sent to the contact database.
2. Fake messages – I think everyone received them at least once, in their lives, these are letters with some kind of sad story and a request for financial assistance.
3. Phishing – a type of Internet fraud, when using fake sites, mailing lists, or social engineering (hacking using the human factor) they try to get confidential user data (logins, passwords, accounts, bank cards).
4. Mailing with viruses – if the user clicks on the link, the virus will be downloaded to the computer.
5. Spam in comments. This type of spam is common on various blogs and forums and is presented as a comment containing a link to the site being promoted.

How do spammers get user addresses?

✅ The account was hacked and the email address was stolen from the contact list.
✅ Using applications to parse emails from different websites.
✅ The use of mail generators, which selects possible email options.
✅ Purchased database of contacts.
✅ Search for emails in Google.

What kind of spammers are there?

1. Professional spammers are specialists, sometimes entire companies. They know their business well and professionally send spam to users.
2. Spammers collect email addresses using programs and then sell the subscriber base. They can be found in FB groups or on forums, email databases are usually divided into categories. Buying a ready-made base at first glance seems like a good idea, but as a rule, such mailings cause more problems than results.
3. Random spammers are inexperienced marketers or just individuals who have not studied the issues of mass mailing and make mistakes.

In order not to end up in the ranks of random spammers, you need to prepare for a mass mailing – to know the legal, technical, and other features.

So, let’s move on to practical recommendations on what you need to know and do so that your letters do not end up in Spam.

Email deliverability is affected by many factors:

✅ the legality of distribution;
✅ the reputation of the domain;
✅ technical settings for mailing;
✅ whether the regulations of the mailing service are observed.

Let’s talk in more detail about each point.

1. Legality of mailing.

This is an important point, in each country, there is a law regulating the issues of such mailings. If you want to send bulk emails, be sure to read all the rules.

The main rule is that mailing should be done only to those addresses that have agreed to receive your emails. Then it won’t be considered spam.

2. Domain reputation.

Reputation is influenced by many factors.

2.1 Subscriber base.

You should carefully monitor the cleanliness of your subscriber base.

If your subscriber does not open your emails for a long time, remove them from your contact list, such clients will still not bring you the expected result.

Emails can become outdated, people just stop using them.

Wrong addresses. If a person indicated his email with an error. To do this, you need to validate the database. There are a lot of such services, just do it regularly.

Also, do not forget to remove those from the database of those who unsubscribed from your mailing list. Some people don’t click the “Unsubscribe” button, they just email you asking you to remove their email from your mailing list. It’s better to do it right away. Because next time they might complain about spam.

2.2 Spam traps.

These are robot addresses that check all incoming mail. Such spam traps are usually found in purchased databases. Double Opt-In will help you deal with this – confirming the address by clicking on a link from the mail.

2.3 User behavior.

From how your subscribers interact with your emails, the email service will determine the level of trust in your domain.

If emails are opened, and read, by people, who respond to them or click on links, it helps you improve your reputation.

If emails are immediately deleted or users complain about spam, this greatly harms the reputation of the domain.

The quality of your content will help fix this situation, make your emails useful, send a newsletter no more than a few times a week, and ask your subscribers to mark your email as “looks safe” if it contains a warning.

2.4 Designing newsletters.

The service may block the distribution due to an invalid HTML structure. There are many nuances to be aware of. The number of spam words in the mailing, the use of Capslock, a lot of links, pictures, etc.

Before sending out a newsletter, test your email with our free template checker, which is available in the free tools on our website. It will show you what parameters you need to change.

2.5 Your address being blacklisted.

These are lists of email addresses that email services consider spam. If your address is there, then your emails will automatically go to the spam folder.

You can check if your email is in the blacklists manually in each of the blacklists. Or just connect your mailbox to the Warmy and run a check, our service will automatically determine if your email is in the blacklists.

After such a check, you can already determine the steps on how to fix the reputation of your domain and exclude your email from the blacklist.

2.6 A sharp increase in the number of emails sent.

If your domain is new and you have never done email newsletters from it or did small ones, then a sharp increase will lead to a loss of reputation. Such emails need to be warmed up, i.e. gradually increase the number of sent emails. Warming up a domain is a very important thing, you need to do it according to all the rules. It is very difficult to make it manually, so we advise you to use an email warming service, such as Warmy.

3. Technical Settings

What parameters should be in the “correct” email:

✅ RFC (Request for Comments) is a document that contains technical specifications and standards.

✅ DNS (rDNS and PTR records) Domain Name System – all servers from which the mailing is being sent must have valid DNS records.

✅ IP Addresses (WHOIS) You cannot hide IP address data in WHOIS. Hosters can be hacked and send spam on behalf of your IP.

✅ Proxy and Relay are protection against sending spam on your behalf. The server must not be with an open Proxy or open Relay.

✅ DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) – a protocol for digitally signing a letter that determines whether the sender has the right to send mail. The mail provider identifies it through a special key.

✅ SPF (Sender Policy Framework) – a record that will show from which domains and/or IP mail will come. This setting must be in all DNS, otherwise, the mail service will send the letter to spam or warn about the threat.

✅ FBL (FeedBack Lookup) – Shows all information about spam complaints. If you have it configured, you will be able to see exactly who marked your email as spam.

✅ List-Unsubscribe Header is an additional ‘unsubscribe’ link generated by some of the most common email providers (Gmail, Outlook, etc.) when list-unsubscribe instructions are detected in the email header. It gives email recipients the opportunity to remove their email addresses from your distribution list without searching for the unsubscribe link in your email.

✅ Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) is an email sender authentication policy based on the DKIM and SPF protocols. This policy determines how the recipient’s mail server should process incoming messages if the sender’s address could not be identified.

Postal service requirements:

In order for the email to be checked for spam successfully, you must respect the requirements of mailing services.

Otherwise, sanctions are possible:

• limit the number of letters;
• send blocking;
• mark as spam.

Gmail requirements:

1. Set up reverse DNS records for IP addresses.
2. Separate addresses by content type. Promotions are sent from one, checks are sent from the other, and alerts are sent from the third address.
3. You cannot send letters on behalf of another domain if you do not have permission to do so.
4. Authenticate messages.
5. Sending only to those users who have consented to the email newsletter.
6. Unsubscribe button.
7. Schedule and speed of sending emails.
8. Monitor the reputation of IP addresses: whether they are on blacklists.