Preventing your emails from being treated as spam:

Spam filters play a very important part in keeping spam emails at bay and use increasingly sophisticated methods to do so. There are times, however, when legitimate emails will be flagged as spam and may be discarded. The following list gives some things to consider when you are composing an email:

1. Avoid using too many capital letters, unnecessary spacing and any unusual or over-use of punctuation.
2. If you find that an email has incorrectly been marked as spam, examine the full header message of the email. This will indicate which parts of the message were marked as spam. If you are using Outlook Express, right-click the message and select properties > details > message source (in Outlook, right-click and View Source). Follow this link to see an example of the kind of tests that are performed on emails to determine if they are spam.
3. If a particular sentence or paragraph is being marked, then rephrasing it may make a difference. It could be that repeating words too many times is causing the problem, or the use of phrases such as 'guaranteed 100 percent', 'full refund', etc.
4. If you are receiving emails that are being marked incorrectly as spam, inform your Internet Service Provider, or ISP, such as AOL, BT, etc (we will expand on this some and provide the details for the main ISPs).
5. Don't send emails in bulk amounts, or use a system or software that does this. Sending one email to many addresses, especially if in the BCC field (as it most likely should be), may automatically be blocked. We send our newsletters in batches of 15 or so and a few minutes apart without being flagged - this may be time consuming and indeed for larger numbers a system such as Constant Contact will need to be considered (we'd most likely use this for the levels we work with - for thousands of addresses, there are many good services, such as Ezemail).

If you need to find out why you are being flagged as spam, send us an email and we'll let you know how we can help. It may be something very simple, in which case we'll just tell you, or if investigation is needed, we'll let you know how to go about this and give you a quote for us to do this for you and come up with a solution.