Are You a Victim of Frequent E-mail Delivery Failure?

If you are like most of us, you probably receive hundreds of junk mail every day. Lots of internet service providers and some individuals, are taking steps to block or reduce the amount of junk email in their inboxes.

However, the trouble with these measures is their inability to identify legitimate email. Assuming that your email to other places is working and yet not being delivered, it's quite possible that you're a victim of these programs.

There are several reasons why legitimate email typically gets erroneously blocked: The receiving system thinks your email looks like spam, the receiving system thinks that you're sending it from an address that is or has been accused of being a spammer. Being automated systems, it's the mistakes associated with that thinking that cause legitimate email to be mistaken for spam.

Spam content filters assign points for various behaviors that are also associated with email that comes from a spammer. As soon as you collect too many points (where "too many" is up to the receiving system, or the individual recipient), your email is flagged as spam. Some of the culprits to watch for in your email include:

• Phrases in your email such as "adults only", "over 18" and the like.
• Sexual performance enhancement drugs.
• Sales related shouting (or alternative SHOUTING or not) as sales copy.
• Email "Reply-to" address that does not match the "from" address.
• Email that contain HTML tags.
• Words and phrases such as "satisfaction guaranteed", "free offer", or any of a host of email sales wording are most likely to get you filtered.

It is also common for emailsto be blocked because it came from an IP address that's been identified as somehow being related to spammers. If you're not getting your email bounced back to you with some indication, this is both harder to detect, and harder to resolve.

I'm not saying that any of those things in your email is bad, or that any one of those things will cause your email to be blocked. The unfortunate reality of the situation is that the more your email looks like spam, however remote, the more likely it is to be treated as spam.

Finally, when you detect that your email address has been blacklisted, or you suspect something is wrong, you should contact your ISP. They're responsible for keeping spammers away from it, and ensuring it's working.

If they can't help, then it's probably time to move on and get an ISP that's interested in keeping your email working always.