At Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:21:46 -0400 Christine Polaczak <chris at cpdesignworks.com> wrote: > > ** Be sure to fill out the survey/skills inventory in the member's area. > ** If you did, we all thank you. > > > Dear Hidden-Tech community, > > I'm in the process of sending an email to a long list of recipients. > I'm sending them individually, with a personalized salutation. The > subject line and the content is the same for each. There's also a > photo attached and imbedded within the text of the message. > > Many of my messages are being rejected as undeliverable, with fatal > errors. They seem to be considered SPAM either by Google or the > recipients' providers. > > How can I configure this mailing successfully? > > Thanks in advance for your advice. Some of the things considered spam: 1) Pure HTML E-Mail. That is, HTML mail *without* a text/plain alternitive part, in a multipart/alternitive message. *Often* Spammers use pure HTML E-Mail as a way to 'hide' phishing messages (pretending to be a bank or Paypal and asking the user to enter their login or banking creditials, for the purposes of identity theft (or plain old theft). Many spam filters mark this as spam and either drop it or reject it. 2) Many spammers ALSO 'personalize' their messages (often with errors or with stupid salutations: 'Dear Info,' or 'Dear Sales,'). Since your *content* is the same, it is highly probably that spam filters are 'learning' your content in the same way as they learned of all of the insanely wealthy people who died without heirs in Nigeria... A personalized salutation is not going to enough to get you past spam filters. Is your 'long list of recipients' an opt-in mailing list? Or something else? It might make sense to use something like Mailman to manage this list (including opting in or out). Mailman (and other E-Mail list software) includes certain mailing list header lines, which tend add 'negative' values to the spam score. This offsets the spam score added by some of the spam-like features of your E-Mail. Yes, this means you message *won't* be as personalized, but it might be the way you need to go. Also, but sending the messages one-by-one, your outbound mailer has the appearence of sending a lot of mail and a lot of it 'looks like' spam (the messages all look the *same*, with only minor differences) -- this would tend to cause your outbound relay look like a spam source and this also adds to the spam score and/or might get you blacklisted with SpamCop, which will also cause E-Mail from your outbound relay to be rejected. > > Chris > > Christine Polaczak > chris at cpdesignworks.com > 413 539-3582 > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Hidden-discuss mailing list - home page: http://www.hidden-tech.net > Hidden-discuss at lists.hidden-tech.net > > You are receiving this because you are on the Hidden-Tech Discussion list. > If you would like to change your list preferences, Go to the Members > page on the Hidden Tech Web site. > http://www.hidden-tech.net/members > > -- Robert Heller -- 978-544-6933 / heller at deepsoft.com Deepwoods Software -- http://www.deepsoft.com/ () ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org -- against proprietary attachments