Avoid the Spam Plague

Today we visit the dark side of e-mail marketing: being accused of sending unsolicited e-mail - worse yet, discovering that your messages are undeliverable to a large number of subscribers due to overzealous anti-spam programs.

What to do?

The very first thing you should do is read up on the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (http://www.spamlaws.com/federal/108s877.html) to familiarize yourself with the law. If the legal jargon is to much to wade through, you can read an excellent article on compliance here: How to Comply with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.

Some of the very basic protections you should have in place are as follows:

Always require double opt-in to your list

Always make opting-out of your list easy

Be willing to manually remove subscribers if they have trouble unsubscribing on their own

Include language in each mailing reminding your subscribers of the opt-in nature of the list

Your next task is to beat the spam filters. A lot of consumers use anti-spam software to filter out unwanted e-mail messages. You should let subscribers know (either on site or within the first autoresponse message) that your messages could be blocked by their filters, and they should place your domain on their "white list" to avoid any problems.

It is especially important to educate your AOL subscribers as well. AOL's spam filtering modules (and even some of their users!) are notorious for blacklisting legitimate e-mails.

Some list owners have reported a delivery failure rate to AOL addresses as high as 60%. You are forewarned. It might even be a good idea to request AOL users to sign up to your list with an alternate address.