Hi there...

Every month my job sends out a newsletter that I program in an HTML table with inline style sheets.

What I've noticed is that it's hit or miss if I wind up in bulk mail in some mail programs... namely Yahoo! and AOL.

I don't send out the email. Rather, it goes to a mailservice... QuadraMail. I asked their tech people about any HTML or XHTML stands in sending an HTML representation of our newsletter... but they said they don't.

I did find something on the web and keep to it: my file is never over 20K, I keep the images to a minimum, I don't use red or blue type, and my width is under 600pixels.

Does anyone have any suggestions. I also send out a text version.

Donna Z.

I suspect it's because the mail is coming from a known campaign sender like Quadra Mail, rather than from your own email address. Bulk mail detectors also look at the routing of an email message, to determine if it originated from the actual sender.

You might have better luck avoiding bulk mail detection if you send the newsletters yourself. But be careful because many ISPs limit the number of messages you can send in a given time period (mine limits me to 25 messages in one minute)... so make sure you spread the delivery out, or find a program that lets you configure a time delay in between messages.

I usually find with Yahoo! and AOL that the problem is because people forget they subscribed to the email and that there is no opt-out link in the email.

So I do two things in this regard:

1) I ask for the person's first and last names (or name):

2) I put an opt-out link in every email blast.

I also never send cold-call emails. If it's a newsletter, people must sign up for it. No UCE from dis hood, homie!

Not sure if any of those apply in your situation, but I find they work.

The other thing you could try is blocking those domains from signing up. Mind you, that's kind of unfriendly and you probably don't want to go there, but at least it would work.

You might want to try this handy tool:
Let your clients send their own email newsletters - MailBuild