Amazon SES mails as spams
I am using amazon SES for sending notification mails. Mails are getting delivered but sometimes mails are moved to spam folder. How is it so? If my method of sending mails is same then why some mails are considered as spam and others not?
Please explain. Thanks in advance
Answer
Great question. Email deliverability (the likelihood that messages will be delivered to the inbox) depends on many different factors. It is a joint responsibility both of the platform you're using (in this case, you mention Amazon SES) and your particular sending program. Depending on whom you're sending to and what sort of inbound mail protection is in place, you will face obstacles with your email delivery if you send mail that generates recipient complaints (aka, "This is Spam" button clicks), bounces for invalid addresses, content that has spammy fingerprints, and are sending to inactive but existing addresses that could actually be spamtraps. ISPs' mission is to protect their recipients from spam, although your definition of spam and theirs can vary. At the end of the day, it's up to you to ensure you're sending email recipients want and that you're quickly removing sending to those recipients who don't want it.
Amazon SES has IP space setup specifically tailored for outbound email based on ISP (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) requirements. We've also rolled out several features that make it dead simple to: authenticate your email Easy DKIM, test your email to ensure you have the proper bounce and complaint handling (Mailbox Simulator) and can get at ISP feedback quickly and easily through Amazon Simple Notification Service (Bounce and Complaint Notifications).
Also, we've put together a whitepaper on sending best practices we recommend. Our blog gets updated frequently and often discusses topics which will impact deliverbility. Finally, we have a resources section that offers 3rd party providers that can assist you in more detail if you're still wondering what steps to take.
We want each of customers to be successful and have the highest deliverability possible. If you find us lacking in any resources or need additional features or data that you can't currently get, I'd love to hear about it so we can make Amazon SES better.
For your particular use case, I would suggest heading over to the Amazon SES so we can troubleshoot together. Pls provide specific details about your situation so we can dig into this. Answers to these questions will help us investigate:
- What ISP are you having issues sending to?
- What type of email are you sending?
- Have your recipients opted in?
- How often do you send email to the same recipients?
- How are you acquiring new recipients?
- Do you have a sample of a message we can review?
- What are you doing with bounces and complaints?
- Are you honoring unsubscribe requests?
- How do you know you're being delivered to the spam folder and how often does it occur?
- Have you checked your content against widely available and free services such as mail-tester.com?
To see the Amazon SES blog, tech documentation, best practices whitepaper, customer forum, and other service centric stuff, pls visit: http://aws.amazon.com/ses/
To see our resources page (also included on the Amazon SES page but a bit further down), visit: http://aws.amazon.com/ses/resources/
Thanks, Chris
P.S. I originally had this answer chock full of links for easy navigation but stackoverlfow stripped them due to spam control measures. The irony!