My world on the web
Other common reasons emails get flagged as spam include sending emails with links, which I’ve typically done to make it easier for people to know who I write for — I won’t be doing this anymore (sorry!); including images in your email; and avoiding words or phrases that the filter associates with spam, from obvious ones like “double your income” to those that are more baffling and problematic, like “medium” (that presents some problems for me, as you can imagine) or “Nigerian” (extremely frustrating and unfair for anyone who needs to discuss subjects relating to Nigeria).
If you’re tech savvy, or lucky enough to have a company with an IT team, updating your SPF and DKIM records can help ensure that emails are landing in the correct inbox. An SPF, or sender policy framework record, is essentially a list of email accounts that are allowed to send messages from a specific domain. This means that only certain email addresses are allowed to send from the theoretical domain, angela dot com. DKIM, or DomainKeys Identified Mail, is a process in which emails are each sent with a key that identifies them as legitimate. Updating these records can make a big difference in your deliverability if you’re using your own domain, though if you have a Gmail account, you’re out of luck in this regard.
This is an interesting topic in that there are so many aspects of the web that are dependent on email. For example, we depend upon it at work to send out new accounts, however these emails were initially completely blocked (not spammed) by Yahoo as they were coming from a mail server.
Although there are many jumping all over newsletters, one wonders what impact spam filtering may have on these. I guess it is a reminder that email is still a somewhat flawed technology.