Nowadays most mail servers have built-in antispam filters; they are quite smart, but sometimes they fail and delete (or mark as spam and redirect to some “spam” folder) perfectly legal messages; this is a common problem with Hotmail and other very popular free mail services. If you feel a lot of your messages are filtered out and not delivered, here are some basic rules to avoid being named a spammer by mistake:
- Always include plain text: “personal” e-mail messages, even if written using HTML format, always include a plain text part. If a plain text part is missing, most antispam filters become suspicious. When you finish composing your message, use SendBlaster’s “Text from HTML” button to automatically create a plain text part from HTML.
- Most of your message must be text; avoid including large images. Once again, antispam filters become suspicious when the image / text ratio is too high.
- Don’t over-attach: attachments should only be used in small, personal lists; if you are publishing a newsletter, upload files on your website and use links instead (your subscribers will be happier too).
- Avoid risky words that are commonly used by spammers and constantly flooding your mailbox.
- Switch to Smtp: While Direct Send mode is very useful in many situations, unfortunately nowadays a lot of mail server refuse direct delivery in order to prevent spam. You should better use Smtp when you are mailing a large amount of recipients.
- Try our featured Free Spam Check Score Software, use it on your email before sending to get a spam rate and understand if the mailservers will tag as SPAM blocking your email
AOL blocks connections on port 25 (see AOL faq), therefore if you are connecting to the Internet using AOL you cannot use Direct Send mode.
Most of the times this is caused by your firewall preventing SendBlaster from accessing the Internet. Please temporarily disable your firewall on your local PC or network gateway before sending.
Some antivirus programs can also be causing this problem; we suggest that you temporarily disable your antivirus too.
A detailed tutorial on troubleshooting is available here: troubleshooting network problems.
When sending to lots of addresses it is normal that not all of the email messages go through: some of the email addresses could have become inactive or be temporarily jammed, e-mail servers could be overloaded, the connection could be momentarily interrupted or slow. If the percentage of sent messages is very low, or even no message is sent, it is necessary to check the Send Settings.
Actually, it could be necessary to change the send mode (direct or through SMTP) and, if your SMTP server uses antispam filters, lower the number of connections and raise the pause between messages. The SMTP server could have restrictions that will prevent you from sending more than a certain number of messages within a specific time span (for instance a given server may not allow sending more than 50 e-mails per hour); in such case, after the first send, the operation will be completed at a later time using the History functions.
If the SMTP server antispam restrictions can’t be overridden and sending operations will go through only with very slow settings, you can try with the direct send or by using a “more tolerant” SMTP server (on the Internet it is possible to subscribe, even for a low price, to very efficient SMTP services).
If the problem arises while using the direct send mode, it may be necessary to manually specify the IP address of the DNS server.
