Posts: 5,938
Name: Adam for web page design, not program
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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Hi there,
This will be cross-posted to a few spots so that I can get my answer as quickly as possible. So for those of you who notice this post in more than one spot, that's the reason.
I keep seeing the same issue, primarily with the three email providers listed above, whereby legitimate email messages are being put into spam/trash/junk mail folders. Yahoo! is the worst offender, but GMail and Hotmail are rapidly closing the gap.
Here are the scenarios:
1) Replies to initial requests made through contact forms (I don't publish email addresses on my server other than as bot traps).
2) Custom-generated form-to-emails. These emails are gathered by my clients in a legitimate manner (no mailing lists, no harvesting, the customer has to contact my client and be fully aware of it before they even get the form-to-email). In some cases, the email is a receipt for online payment or for completion of a shopping cart, and the customer not only is aware of the email but is expecting it.
3) Mailing lists my clients run are opt-in lists and I know full well about them (all two of them.)
I have done everything humanly possible to ensure that this doesn't keep happening that I know of. I've changed code on HTML-based emails to ensure no images were embedded and that it was all text-based; I've used plain text; I've changed words 20-30 times; I've tried creating accounts, flagging the emails as "Not Spam" and encouraging others to do the same.
I do realize that there are a whole bunch of people who would likely say the same thing, and that there are probably a lot of spammers in that bunch. The difference between them and me is that I'm willing to work with email providers to meet whatever standards they have in place and open up what I'm doing to them if necessary so they can offer suggestions of such.
So: what do I need to do to solve this issue? Where are the people I get in touch with? What do I need to show or establish as far as minimum guidelines to show I'm playing straight? And how the hell do I, or anyone else with legitimate intentions, show that we don't like spam any more than the email providers do and take steps to fight it?
Thanks.
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