How to reduce the posibility of getting marks as spam ?

perrohunter

HI !

Recently Ive realized that using the function mail() from php usually get my mails marked as spam =( , so i start using SMTP and all stuff till i get a really nice App to send rich html emails ! =)

they questions comes here, If I attach the images I use in the html email, will this reduce the chance for my email of getting mark as spam >?

greetings !

dagon

mail uses smtp, so it makes no difference, images and html increases your chance of being marked as spam - well depending on the spam filters

NogDog

Using multiple recipients in the "To:", "Cc:" (worse) and/or "Bcc:" (worst) headers will probably raise your spam rating in most filters. Malformed or invalid mail headers of any sort will be suspicious (a good reason to use a dependable mail class to handle all these details). Sending the email from a web host provider which has allowed spamming may get your email blacklisted by filters that look at the source IP address (they may ban the whole range of IP's allocated to that hosting company).

MarkR

Your main way of avoiding being marked as spam is not sharing a server with spammers.

Some general tips:

Use dedicated hosting - use an IP address that you regularly monitor for blacklist inclusion. If your IP address appears on a blacklist, try to find out why and get it removed.
Don't forge "From:" headers - don't send messages from a domain you don't own, control, and have permissions to send mail from
Make sure the envelope sender is right - typically it should be the same as "From:"
Don't actually send any spam!
Make sure that neither your application nor anything else on the server is vulnerable to being used as a spam gateway (Hint: avoid header injection in mail())

Mark