The first step would be to ensure that your list is truly opt-in by
making it a CONFIRMED opt-in list. Meaning that after signing up for
your newsletter, the recipient must click on a confirmation email to
confirm that their email address was entered correctly and that they
are the ones who actually requested to be on the list.
Then, there are a number of ways to ensure that you stay in the
"in-box"; one of the up-and-coming methods is to have a third party
certify your email. An example of this type of organization is Habeas
(http://www.habeas.com).
There is also a fairly large effort underway to enable email
authentication (http://www.emailauthentication.org/index.html)
although I don't really think that particular element can be helpful
quite yet.
Another area which would help you is to keep your "newsletter" domain
separate from other Internet ventures. Not only should you have a
separate IP address for this domain, it shouldn't be on the same
server or in the same net block of any domain which may be perceived
to be SPAM related. The reverse IP look-up should resolve to this
separate domain as well. (From a bit of quick investigation, I see
that is not the case for you right now... with 11 domains sharing the
same IP address).
I am a bit curious, though about a couple of things in your question.
First, a SpamAssassin score of 0.8 is remarkable for a newsletter! I
would highly doubt that would cause any problem with receiving due to
a SpamAssassin filter (which is generally set at the LOWEST point to
about 5.0, or perhaps even 3.0 if they want to really be firm... but
that's still plenty of headroom for your 0.8).
Although SpamAssassin is mostly used at the smaller ISP level and the
score would do little to influence other types of SPAM filtering used
by various email clients. So, certification as mentioned above may be
your best bet to get beyond these.
I also find it curious that you said you "prefer not to ask our
customers to add us to their contact/white list". If your customers
like doing business with you and they are also concerned about too
much SPAM in their mailbox, as an Internet business it would be VERY
appropriate for you to provide a bit of education to your customers
about the value of their white-list.
In fact, according to http://www.netmanners.com, it is the recipients
responsibility to ensure that they have added any domain to their
safe/white-list when making a request to receive further information.
(http://www.onlinenetiquette.com/email-whitelist-etiquette.html).
Helping your customers to stay a bit better informed seems to be
within the mission of your company... you might give it a try!
Good Luck!
TechSoEasy |
