Stay out of the Junk folder

If you have a large lead database there are a few things to remember to help keep you (and us) off the Spam Blacklists when sending email to your whole list. These things will improve the number of your emails that make it to peoples inboxes.

1. Keep your list clean. If someone replys to your mail asking to be removed, unsubscribe them (under Edit in the lead manager). If an email bounces, unsubscribe or delete them. In 2.5 all emails now contain an Unsubscribe link which is good to keep those that don't want mail from you to from getting more mail.
   Mail servers keep track of the number of bounces you have and if that number gets too high they may block you IP. Only spammers have dirty lists.
2. Don't email them all at once. Find a way to spread it out over a few days. Maybe 1000 a day? And if possible spread it out over the day. Many spam filters contain "thresholds" and if they see 2000 messages coming into their network all at once your more likely to get your IP blocked or throttled. This is more of an issue with big mail companies like MSN/Hotmail/Live or GMail or Yahoo.
3. Send the mail from an address belonging to your domain. Don't send mail as agent@hotmail.com or bob@yahoo.com as these will be seen as forged addresses and will get blocked.
4. Don't send SPAM or UBE. Don't send mail that will only be of use or valuable to a small portion of the recipients. Messages like "Check out this property!" only really appeal to a small set of your total lead database. Messages about mortgage rates or government tax breaks are more useful to a large set of people. The goal here is to keep people from clicking the "Report as Spam" button in their email client (most webmail systems have this).
5. Put the date in the subject. Adding the date to the subject of newsletters helps filters know that its a newsletter.
6. Don't send HTML heavy emails. Best bet is to turn the HTML mode off and use a plain text only message. This will look better in more email clients and will be less spammy since HTML is often associated with spam. Avoid lots of links and images if you are using HTML. If your emails are full of red or bold font and images and links you are much more likely to get flagged as spam.

One other suggestion would be to use the "Send this email at a later date and time" feature in 2.5 since the script can time out when your sending a lot of mail. You can set it for 15 min in the future. This will save you the aggrivation of clicking the send button and having the page hang while its sending all that mail. This can also be used to help you break up your mail into smaller sets to mail out over the day and week.

I would also suggest using a pre-built email (or Document) and test it on yourself first to make sure it looks good in different email programs (Outlook, Hotmail, Gmail). Also SpamCheck provides a service for reporting the spammyness of your email. Simply send a test to spamcheck@sitesell.net and start the subject with TEST and it will send you a report on your message. They also have some more tips.

I hope these things help you stay out of the junk folder.

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