How to make sure email you send programmatically is not automatically marked as spam

emailemail-spam

This is a tricky one and I've always relied on techniques, such as permission-based emails (i.e. only sending to people you have permission to send to) and not using blatantly spamish terminology.

Of late, some of the emails I send out programmatically have started being shuffled into people's spam folder automatically and I'm wondering what I can do about it.

This is despite the fact that these particular emails are not ones that humans would mark as spam, specifically, they are emails that contain license keys that people have paid good money for, so I don't think they're going to consider them spam

I figure this is a big topic in which I am essentially an ignorant simpleton.

Best Answer

Use email authentication methods, such as SPF, and DKIM to prove that your emails and your domain name belong together, and to prevent spoofing of your domain name. The SPF website includes a wizard to generate the DNS information for your site.

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 IP-address that you're using is not on a blacklist

Make sure that the reply-to address is a valid, existing address.

Use the full, real name of the addressee in the To field, not just the email-address (e.g. "John Smith" <john@blacksmiths-international.com> ).

Monitor your abuse accounts, such as abuse@yourdomain.com and postmaster@yourdomain.com. That means - make sure that these accounts exist, read what's sent to them, and act on complaints.

Finally, make it really easy to unsubscribe. Otherwise, your users will unsubscribe by pressing the spam button, and that will affect your reputation.

That said, getting Hotmail to accept your emails remains a black art.

Related Solutions

Linux – How to send a file as an email attachment using Linux command line

None of the mutt ones worked for me. It was thinking the email address was part of the attachemnt. Had to do:

echo "This is the message body" | mutt -a "/path/to/file.to.attach" -s "subject of message" -- recipient@domain.com

Python – How to send email attachments

Here's another:

import smtplib
from os.path import basename
from email.mime.application import MIMEApplication
from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.mime.text import MIMEText
from email.utils import COMMASPACE, formatdate


def send_mail(send_from, send_to, subject, text, files=None,
              server="127.0.0.1"):
    assert isinstance(send_to, list)

    msg = MIMEMultipart()
    msg['From'] = send_from
    msg['To'] = COMMASPACE.join(send_to)
    msg['Date'] = formatdate(localtime=True)
    msg['Subject'] = subject

    msg.attach(MIMEText(text))

    for f in files or []:
        with open(f, "rb") as fil:
            part = MIMEApplication(
                fil.read(),
                Name=basename(f)
            )
        # After the file is closed
        part['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename="%s"' % basename(f)
        msg.attach(part)


    smtp = smtplib.SMTP(server)
    smtp.sendmail(send_from, send_to, msg.as_string())
    smtp.close()

It's much the same as the first example... But it should be easier to drop in.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – How to send a file as an email attachment using Linux command line

Python – How to send email attachments

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