Dave Naffziger's Blog

MediaPost, one of the daily emails I subscribe to, has a chip on their shoulder about spam filtering in Gmail (and hotmail to a lesser extent). Nearly all of MediaPost’s messages get filtered into the spambox by default in Gmail. Every few months, they run an article about poor email deliverability in Gmail.

We had this same problem with the first Judy’sBook newsletter. Naturally, the first thing we did was have the email scanned by open-source SpamAssassin. SpamAssassin flagged a few things that were easily fixed, and the problem was addressed.

So, rather than grouse about spam filtering MediaPost should just make their fixes and tell their audience how to make the same fixes. Below are the SpamAssassin results for my most recent MediaPost newsletter (I would link, but they require registration):

0.8 PORN_11 BODY: Uses words and phrases which indicate porn (11)
1.5 CLICK_BELOW BODY: Asks you to click below
0.0 HTML_WEB_BUGS BODY: Image tag intended to identify you
0.3 MIME_HTML_MOSTLY BODY: Multipart message mostly text/html MIME
0.1 HTML_50_60 BODY: Message is 50% to 60% HTML
0.0 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message
0.0 MAILTO_LINK RAW: Includes a URL link to send an email
-0.8 WEB_BUGS RAW: Image tag with an ID code to identify you
-0.8 SLIGHTLY_UNSAFE_JAVASCRIPT RAW: JavaScript code which can easily be executed

They would terrific bang for the buck just by removing the ‘please click here’ text that gets shown when images are blocked. In fact, I would guess that this would entirely address gmail deliverability.