Spam Protection Ate My Newsletter! - Off Page Optimization
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There are spam watchers outside of those that watch what comes in on mail servers. Some people have individual clients or use spam databases to help filter mail. These resources are not foolproof.
The easiest tool to check for this sort of a problem is Google. First, choose a newletter; you don’t want to pick the most recent newsletter, since it may take a couple days for an online spam resource to post your mail online. Also, don’t count on search engines having gotten a chance to index the page if the newsletter is very recent.
Once in your friendly search engine, type the subject line of a newsletter you mailed in quotation marks (“Developer Shed Weekly Update for 2007-07-19” or “Developer Shed Weekly Update for”). If this returns nothing unexpected, that’s good. But try again. Enter a phrase from inside the newsletter in quotation marks. Enter the email address which sends your newsletter. Hopefully, you’ve gotten nothing but the mirror of your own newsletter (which you should be posting on your website).
This is how we found the red flag on Developer Shed’s newsletter. It was erroneously included in one of these online spam catalogs, Spam Trace. The Spam Trace service includes an email blocker the prevents POP email addresses from recieving mails in its database.
So let’s see how to handle the situation if your newsletter turns up in these databases. Any reputable spam tracker will have a contact address, though you may need to go hunting for it. Once you have located it, send a polite email explaining the situation in detail.
As an example, here is what Developer Shed’s CTO mailed to Spam Trace:
Hello,
It has been reported to us that you have marked our weekly newsletter as spam on your site. Here is a URL:
http://www.spamtrace.info/email/3364/
Our weekly newsletter is anOPT-IN service, and we offer a clear opt-out at the bottom of each and every newsletter.
Please look into this, and remove us from your spam list. You can contact me directly with any questions.
Rich Smith,CTO Developer Shed, Inc. www.developershed.com
Two days later, we received this response:
Rich,
Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
I apologise for this, the process of gathering emails is automatic and the amount through each day is large. We do have processes in place to stop things like this unfortunately this fell through the cracks.
I've checked the full database and your newsletter had 9 entries, I have deleted them all and put code in place so your site should no longer but put in our database.
Regards, Mike
Whether it was a cataloging mistake or somebody had submitted our newsletter to the company, we were being penalized for our regular mailings despite them following all the rules. Thankfully, Spam Trace was very effective, and by the time we received that email none of the Developer Shed newsletters remained on their server.
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