Automated e-mails from your site - avoiding them being junked

[wecando.biz]

We create automatic e-mails from our site to alert our users to specific events (as an aside, a page is coming to set alerts are sent as e-mail to help control volumes and importance).

Our first attempts in early testing of automated e-mails were almost entirely getting passed to junk filters. We changed the sending e-mail address from noreply@ to help@wecando.biz and this improved things. We made sure that the recipients first name was always being used and this helped more. Finally we put in a larger signature with details of how to unsubscribe and I am unsure this helped as such, but it does at least ensure that we can't be acused of spamming.

I am sure some are still going the way of the junk folder and a user of ours suggested that our mails coming from a .BIZ domain could be causing this.

Is this likely to be the case? Does anyone else have any tips that could help us see a greater delivery rate?

My thanks in anticipation.

Best regards

IH

[peterjhale]

I haven't heard of this before but you never know.

This is what spam assasin checks for (a massive list BTW)
http://spamassassin.apache.org/tests_3_2_x.html

and here's something that will score your email
http://web0.lyris.com/resources/contentchecker/

as it maybe some of the words you use get caught

If you have an aweber account, all messages are
automatically scored - we make sure ours get a
score of zero. Most spam assasin accounts default
at a score of 5, but of course users can reduce that
so more emails are marked as spam.

[wecando.biz]

That's really useful peter - I have been looking for a service like that you have made me aware of for some time.

The good news is that our current Invitation e-mail, probably the most contentious, scores 0.53, which isn't bad.

I'll be playing with this further as I am pretty sure that Hotmail files it as junk still anyway.

Best regards

IH