How to Make Your Email Messages Look Less Like Spam

If your email messages look too much like spam, destination mail providers might reject them or send them to the recipients’ Junk or Spam folders.

To make your email messages look less like spam:

• In the email subject and/or content, try not to have:

  • words and phrases commonly found in spam messages;

  • an abnormally short message containing just several words;

  • a single paragraph that’s abnormally long;

  • words in all uppercase when not using acronyms, both in the subject as well as the body text;

  • sentences that don’t begin with a capital letter each;

  • unusual grammatical structures;

  • unusual or missing punctuation;

  • space characters immediately before commas, periods, exclamation marks, question marks, colons, and semi-colons;

  • more than one space character after commas, periods, exclamation marks, question marks, colons, and semi-colons;

  • multiple empty lines between paragraphs; or

  • one or more images but very little text; just to name a few.

• When sending email from a domain hosted at HostM:

  • The email address in the ‘From’ field must be based on your actual hosted domain, not a domain hosted elsewhere.

  • When sending email using a desktop or mobile email app, ensure that your outgoing (SMTP) mail settings are set to the ones that we’ve provided, not the ones provided by any other party, such as your internet connection provider.

• If you’re sending an email message to more than a small handful of recipients, send a single copy per recipient, rather than a single copy to numerous recipients, especially when it comes to newsletters, mailing lists, etc.

  You may wish to use a mailing list app for this purpose, as it will typically handle this for you, or you could do it manually if desired.

• If you’re sending out an HTML email using a mailing list app, be sure to also specify a fall-back plain text version of the same message.

• When sending out a newsletter or message to a mailing list, always include a working one-click unsubscribe link at the bottom of the message. Most mailing list apps can be set up to handle this for you.

Your email should now look less like spam, and is less likely to be rejected by destination mail servers or be sent to the recipients’ Junk or Spam folders.