SpamAssassin’s Tips on Deliverability
Email Deliverability - Justin Premick - October 30th, 2007 - PermalinkWe get a lot of questions about SpamAssassin, the popular content filtering tool. It’s used by smaller ISPs and individual domains to minimize unwanted mail on their networks, and we automatically check users’ messages against it in the control panel.
People often want to know what’s a “good” SpamAssassin score, and/or how they can get their score to 0, so that their messages don’t trigger false positives.
I can certainly give my own take on SA, but why not get the skinny directly from them?
The SpamAssassin wiki contains a page that discusses what you can do to avoid false positives.
Rule #1: Stop Micro-Managing Your Content
The first tip from the SpamAssassin gang addresses the #1 thing we see people doing: trying to get their already low message scores all the way down to 0:
As long as you keep your score relatively low (in most cases, this is anywhere below 4 to 5 on the SA scale), you’ll be fine.
Some Other Notable Deliverability Tips
Check Out All of SpamAssassin’s Tips
These are a few deliverability tips I cherry-picked from their wiki. To read the rest, head over to the SpamAssassin site:
and for more tips on getting to the inbox, grab a copy of our Email Deliverability Guide
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 7:00 am and is filed under Email Deliverability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment response, trackback from your own site, or permalink.
October 30th, 2007 at 10:50 am
Usually, our emails rate 0 on Spam Assassin.
However, occasionally, they rate an 0.5 with the accompanying note saying that the message "contains a link to a likely spammer".
However, when you scroll through the message, no link is highlighted.
As we publish a newsletter, where members are allowed link their own sites, and provide links to sites they find useful, it is difficult to pinpoint which link is the offending one.
Does anybody have any idea how to do this?
October 30th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
You should discourage people from sending html in email. HTML is for web pages, email is intended to be plain text. Sending me html will get your email listed as spam faster than anything else. Let me reiterate EMAIL IS SUPPOSED TO BE PLAIN TEXT!!!!!
October 30th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
Neil,
Your comment highlights a good point: not everyone prefers the same formatting on emails.
This is one reason why we emphasize that you should always include a plain text version when sending an HTML email. Some people prefer to read email in plain text (and may even turn off HTML in their email program).
With respect to your comment that "email is intended to be plain text" I have to disagree. I personally find well-formatted HTML messages easy to read and scan, and know that others also find the format preferable.
Moreover, if email were "intended" to be plain text, then it’s unlikely that modern email clients such as AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, Thunderbird, Outlook, etc. would permit any HTML to be displayed in their programs. And as we all know, they do indeed permit HTML.
Different strokes for different folks.
October 30th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
Plain text e-mail is just….Plain. I like an HTML e-mail, it reminds me of a newsletter and I can jump around to the sections of the message I’m most interested in quickly. With text e-mails, everything looks exactly the same and if I’m busy, I might delete it rather than scan through it to see if it interests me.
November 1st, 2007 at 6:11 pm
Thank You for the usefull Tips on Deliverability!
November 6th, 2007 at 5:55 pm
About Spamassassin score: It happens that I use a Top Level Domain (TLD) ".BIZ" that is associated with much spam. I discover that the Spamassassin Score goes down, as the message is longer (=more valuable). I think, it is said that some TLDs get penalized that way. But it seems like one can live with it.
About HTML Emails: I admit I preferred to write plain text only emails until recently. It was AWeber, that made me investigate the HTML issue with emails further. Now I use a simple HTML Template with a graphics header and some text formatting and send combined HTML/Plain text messages. I don’t limit this to the newsletter, but also write more HTML/Plain text mails on an individual basis. It looks very professional, if you do it right and don’t misuse the HTML. — John
November 6th, 2007 at 6:38 pm
Thanks John - I think you have hit the nail on the head, and you are also right in saying that the longer the message - the less likely it is that Spam Assassin will highlight the problem.
Since starting this thread, I have isolated the newsletters that brought up a warning, and by laboriously removing one link at a time (I kow - I lead a sad life!) and re-checking the score, I have managed to work out which domain is causing the spam-assassin warning.
Unfortunately, it is a domain used by more than a few musicians!
Still, at least now I know.