Email Spam Prevention – How to Prevent Mail Being Marked as Spam

Be sure that your emails don’t look like typical spam emails: don’t insert only a large image; check that the character-set is set correctly; don’t insert “IP-address only” links. Write your communication as you would write a normal email. Make it really easy to unsubscribe or opt-out. Otherwise, your users will unsubscribe by pressing the “spam” button, and that will affect your reputation.

On the technical side: if you can choose your SMTP server, be sure it is a “clean” SMTP server. IP addresses of spamming SMTP servers are often blacklisted by other providers. If you don’t know your SMTP servers in advance, it’s a good practice to provide configuration options in your application for controlling batch sizes and delay between batches. Some mail servers don’t accept large sending batches or continuous activity.

Use email authentication methods, such as SPF, and DKIM to prove that your emails and your domain name belong together. The nice side-effect is you help in preventing that your email domain is spoofed. Also check your reverse DNS to make sure the IP address of your mail server points to the domain name that you use for sending mail.

Make sure that the reply-to address of your emails are a valid, existing addresses. Use the full, real name of the addressee in the To field, not just the email-address (e.g. "John Doe" <john.doe@example.com> ) and monitor your abuse accounts, such as abuse@example.com and postmaster@example.com.

You should check with your SMTP service to see if they process their SMTP logs looking for whether your mail was received or not. Many times, there are helpful clues about whether the recipient domain accepted the mail or not.

Additionally, you should set up a SPF record, especially if your SMTP service is sending mail from a different domain and/or IP.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework