I have recently started with a small company that is having pretty bad problems with mail ending up in peoples junk folders. They used to send large bursts of newsletters from the one address every 2 months, but I have now convinced them to stop, and use MailChimp.Ive checked our domain to make sure we are not Blacklisted anywhere and chased up with our mail service provider that we have reverse DNS and SPF set up.I have started including Opt-Out options in newsletters to reduce the chance of more people marking them as junk. But the problem seems to be persisting and we are not really in a position to keep on going like this, as several important mails are not arriving, even after people add us to their contacts.So. onto the actual questions! Is there anything else that I can do to quickly repair our reputation, or reduce the risk of being flagged as spam?Also, is there any credence to the suggestion to opt for a business package like those google offer? Would they make any difference to the problem?Sorry for the wordy question!
Problems with bad mail reputation
spam;reputation;mail
Most anti-spam solutions (whether hosted or in-house, might be installed software or hardware appliance for example) have an element of learning to them - for example if they have received what looks like spam then the anti-spam systems will have a reputation against your SMTP server's IP address and/or domain name and unfortunately it is very difficult to have a reputation improved upon with systems like this.Your options as I see them are (these could work well in combination!):Ask your customers to white-list your domain name to ensure they receive your emails (not ideal or practical really in my opinion);Register a new domain name and start using that for your email instead, redirecting messages from the old domain to your new one. For example, if you had an address tfp456@mydomain.com, you might use tfp456@mydomain.net. A domain that has not been used for email before will not have historical spamming reputations on anti-spam systems.Change your sender IP address. Most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can change your IP address upon request, especially if you are a business - or you could request an additional IP address if they won't and use that instead, or you could use an SMTP relay service (there actually are some companies out there that offer this). If your email server is a hosted solution rather than on your own premises then you could change provider and will therefore end up with a new sender IP address.Ensure that emails you send out do not appear to be like spam due to lack of appropriate email signature, very poor spellings, use of common spam phrases or words etc.While not all anti-spam systems will acknowledge newer technology, as @Martijn has suggested you should ensure you have an appropriate SPF record setup for your domain which allows mail only from your approved SMTP server sender IP addresses. Using DKIM may help too.When any of your customers tell you that your messages are getting marked as Spam ask them to send you an MX Toolbox report so that you can investigate why and address the root cause. Leaving issues unaddressed over time can leave you with a poor reputation.