eZine Publishers: How you can avoid my ugly mistake.
by Jogena (c) 2005 jogena.com

I really messed up when I sent a recent issue of our ezine, Across Jogena's Domain.

Our subscribers with email accounts at AOL, GoDaddy, At&T, and a few others didn't get the chance to receive our ezine because it was bounced before it even reached their mailboxes.

Let me start by saying that I always send each issue to myself first to check it against the SpamAssassian software on my web host to check the spam probability rating. In this case it came back with a .3 which is well within the limit of passing most filters. I thought everything was ok.

But, when I checked my email a few hours later there were numerous bounced emails. Way too many to be from inactive addresses or full mailboxes. The first few simply said: reason: 554 The message was rejected because it contains prohibited virus or spam content. I am thinking that the SpamAssassian software I used couldn't be that far off the correct rating...

Then I looked at one of the bounces from AOL and it gave a link to their site which explained why the email bounced. The reason they gave was, "There is at least one URL in your email that is generating substantial complaints from AOL members."

My first action was to take another look at the URLs I had included in that issue. My second action was to run them through the Spam Database Lookup at dnsstuff.com . After running each one, I found one that was listed in 7 different spam databases.

Now, I'm not accusing anyone of being a spammer because for all I know they could of been found guilty by the databases without having the chance to defend their self or it could be that they just happened to be in the same block of IP addresses as the guilty party or perhaps their web host doesn't have their email system configured correctly. I can't say. There are a lot of people out there far more qualified than me to determine that.

I did learn a very valuable lesson from this though. All spam filters are not alike.

After receiving all the bounces, I ran my ezine through 2 other filters. One of them gave a rating of 1.2 and the other gave a rating of .99 and neither of them picked up the problem with the URL.

While I think that most are probably pretty close, I found that it pays to double check and take a few minutes to run any outside URLs through the spam databases just to be sure.

The point to this story is that I should of checked the URLs that I included in my ezine immediately before sending it.

There are hundreds of spam databases. Here are a few sites that will lead you to them.

DNSstuff.com
You can get the URL's IP address here also.
http://www.dnsstuff.com/

Mx Toolbox eMail Blacklist
http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx?AG=GBL

Passive Spam Blocklist
http://psbl.surriel.com/

MAPS
http://www.mail-abuse.com/index.html

To find out how some spam is filtered you can check out
The Spamhaus Project.
http://www.spamhaus.org/

Other resources:

Spam Assassian
http://spamassassin.apache.org/

Spamihilator
http://www.spamihilator.com/

SpamCheck at SiteSell.com
http://spamcheck.sitesell.com/

Lyris ContentChecker
http://www.lyris.com/email-marketing-resources/contentchecker/

AOL Postmaster Info
http://postmaster.info.aol.com/

Have a great day and keep on publishing!

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Jogena is an experienced webmaster and founder of Jogena's eBook and eZine Directories. Drop by and list your ezines and ebooks at Jogena's. http://www.jogena.com