Believe it or not, global spam is decreasing.
According to Statistica, spam has gone from 65.7% of all email in January 2014 to 53.49% in September 2018. This is due in part to a real improvement in spam filters, which are stopping spam emails being delivered and making it less profitable. A few years ago the majority of spam came from Russia, but the USA now leads the way with 13% of all spam originating there.
We're constantly looking for ways to block spam from being delivered to our clients, while also trying to ensure that our clients' outbound emails are delivered without problems.
For incoming emails, we use a top-notch spam filtering system which is available for free to all our customers, and which we can tweak to be more or less aggressive depending on their needs.
For outgoing emails we spend a lot of time educating our clients about email marketing best practice, testing email campaigns to make sure they're not marked as spam, and vigilance to ensure that our mail server has a good reputation.
Mail tester
To test outgoing emails for spamminess, we use the excellent free tool mail-tester.com.
You send your email to a specified address and they give you feedback on the content of the email, as well as the settings on the mail server that it comes from. They check that anti-spam systems like SPF and DKIM are set up correctly on the sending server,
Sender Score
An excellent tool we use to keep an eye on the reputation of our mail server is Sender Score. The basic version of the system is free. It assigns a score out of 100 based on a range of factors including whether your server is on any blacklists, how many complaints there have been about it, and how many spam traps have been activated by emails from your server.
I love a challenge, and I've been trying to improve our Sender Score for many years, because it's a great indicator of whether our clients' emails are getting delivered. We've put in a huge amount of effort into security, monitoring and client education and have seen our Sender Score improve from the low 90s a few years ago up to a consistent 100 for the whole of the last month!
Well done us :)
