Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

There are a lot of different rules that could send your emails to the spam folder. MailChimp has a good article that reveals a long list of phrases, words, subject lines, and email attributes that determine if an email is spam -https://www.mailchimp.com/. However, I believe every email provider has different rules. There is no 100% surefire way to ensure your email won't be blocked. But following that list, as well as using general email best practices and following CAN SPAM will get you most of the way there.

There's no tool that can guarantee you won't be blocked. There are too many different filters or customized versions of spam filters around. Plus email blocking depends on a lot more than just the content of your email.

However, there are some tools that you can use to clear up obvious content problems. Any self-respecting email service provider (the people who send out your emails for you) should have one built into their system.

There are free ones like:

https://spamcheck.sitesell.com/(I've not used any, so I just give this as a random example)

And paid services that will audit your emails and processes for deliverability problems. People like Pivoital Veracity and Return Path. Not cheap though.

The general tenor at the moment is that the content of your email plays a decreasing role in email blocking. Things like your sender reputation are growing in importance.

This is definitely a moving target but there are some very good tools out there to help determine how the email will look in various clients, what specifc changes you should make to words or coding, and whether the email will be delivered to specific ISPs, routed to the bulk box, or not delivered at all. Pivotal Veracity is the one I recommend as they give actionable reports and are consistently rated as the top rated provider. Another company that is good is Habius. We offer these tools but I'm just here to help provide some info.
Another thing that helps is to ensure is that you have an SPF (sender policy framework) entry in your DNS record - simply go towww.dnsstuff.comand type in your web site to get a free report.

You can contact me for more info - hope this help!