Email Subject Line To Avoid Message Going To Spam or Junk
 

I am a volunteer for our homes association. Many times when I send an email to a homeowner the message goes into their junk or spam folder and they never see it.

For the subject line I usually put "Woodland Reserve -" then the homeowner's street address so I can easily tell who I sent the message to. Would it help if I put the homeowner's first and last name then maybe their email account would recognize the message as being legitimate.

Are there any ideas on what I can put into the Subject line to make the message go into the recipient's Inbox instead of into junk or spam?

Thanks very much for your help.

Bill

I don't think there's any subject line format that will magically stop emails being flagged as spam. If there was, spammers would use it!

If this happens very often it might help you to find out why the emails are so often classed as spam. Unfortunately to do that you'd need the recipients to be willing to forward copies of those mails back to you (as attachments) and then you'd have to inspect those attachments and make sense of headers within them that should give hints as to how their mail systems classified them.

The copies need to come back to you as attachemnts so that their entire content, including their headers, survive the round trip, and are separate from the headers that are part of the routeing of the covering mail they send to you (with that content).


Probably what you need to do is advise each recipient to put you (ie your sending email address) in their address book as a contact. Some mail systems are less likely to class as spam any mails arriving from someone's known contacts. Personally I don't think that's particularly safe - almost all the spam I get comes from acquaintances whose computers are infected ... that is, being a contact makes their mails riskier.

Jeremy, thanks very much for your reply to my question.

I agree with all of Jeremy’s comments. There isn’t anything you can add to the subject or message body which will classify it as “not spam”. But certain content (especially in the message body) could be making your messages seem more spammy, such as mention of an estate or available funds or limited time offers.

Other things may make the message seem like spam to certain recipient email accounts:

• If you send your messages through an email SMTP server which is associated with sending spam (especially certain providers with free accounts), your message might be classified as likely spam.
• If you send many messages to addresses at a single email provider, their system might think you are spamming their members. This will be aggravated if the messages are all sent at one time.
• Some of the recipients might have accidentally (or purposely) marked one of your previous messages as spam. There is often some manner in which they can mark a message in their spam folder as not-spam to fix this, but they might not be familiar with that feature.
• Some email systems seem to have a strange mind of their own about certain messages, and classify them as spam for reasons beyond our understanding. <LOL>

Bill

Send a copy of one of these emails to a randomly generated address at mail-tester.com (they give you the address when you visit the site), click through to see their recommendations. In many cases, this will be quite helpful.

But if you're going to the Hotmail spam folder specifically, join the club. Anyone not checking their spam folder at Hotmail has a high chance of missing important email. Case in point: https://mxrouteprod.b-cdn.net/wp-con...O-980x552.jpeg

Outlook.com (live+hotmail) has different methods from Gmail.

I'm on a political party list and when enough others mark messages as spam, they are put in my Junk Mail. They even move from Inbox later on! Moving the message from Junk Mail to Inbox helps.

It's best to include a signature recommending they add your email to contacts, which works with every provider. Webmail sometimes has a "add safe sender" option.

It seems that spam filtering has grown to be a bigger problem than spam is.