Email going to spam

We are always working on ensuring more reliable email delivery.  There are several things we do to try and ensure reliable email delivery at all times.  

We send all email from addresses representing your club on our domain hitssports.co.uk, we send only from servers registered with appropriate SPF records on our domain hitssports.co.uk.  This means that email providers should be more likely to accept the incoming email.

All email is sent with DKIM domain key, this sends an encrypted key that ensures the email has been sent by us as only we hold this key.

Included in every message is now an unsubscribe link that gives the receiver the option to unsubscribe from any future mailings.  If this is requested by any email owner we will not send future emails to that address.

All hard bounces (email addresses that do not exist) are automatically added to the unsubscribed link to prevent repeat delivery to mail servers.

We do however still experience issues from time to time with emails not getting through spam filters.  There are several things you can do to ensure reliable delivery.

1. If you ask users to add the address that emails come from <yourclubsubdomain>@hitssports.co.uk (send yourself a test email to be sure), to their address book.  
2. If an email ends up in Spam folder.  Ask your member to read it and mark it as NOT SPAM.  This effectively reports the preference to the Emaill provider.  Email providers use these reports to refine their settings on what is categorised as spam.
   (note with most providers the spam folder is only visible through the webmail interface, messages are filtered before being delivered to Outlook, Windows Live mail, Apple Mail etc)
3. When sending mass emails don't send an identical email to the whole club.  Use the personalisation features in the editor to personalise them.  Instead of typing "Dear All", you can right click in the editor and insert a dynamic firstname field, resulting in Dear ##firstname##.  The system will automatically merge each members name into the email. A personalised email looks less "spammy" than the same email sent 500 times!
4. Check your bounced email reports in your website.  These are found under the Communications > Bounced Emails, work through these and ensure you update member records where their email is out of date.

Ensuring email is delivered reliably is of course very important to us, if you are experiencing issues please do get in touch and we will investigate.  In order that we can investigate we need to know specific information on who didn't receive an email, and exactly when it was sent.