I recently noticed that automatic mails sent by one of my online shops were flagged as spam when using GMX, GMail or generally mail services which are using SpamAssassin to filter out spam.
Sending out plain text-mails is old and rusty, if you want to deliver pretty mails to your customers you have to use HTML, unfortunately there is no way around it, but how to make sure that those pretty HTML mails actually reach the customer? Spam filters like SpamAssassin treat HTML Mails as potentially dangerous, so you have to use HTML very carefully.
If you do use HTML Mails you have to create two kinds of Bodys, one HTML Mail Body and one PlainText Mail Body. I show you how to do this in C# / ASP.NET 2.0 by using the built-in System.Net.Mail Class after some general advices.
Here are some recommendations for a automatic HTML mails which are being sent out a hundred times per day:
- Don’t forget to add <html><body>Your HTML Text/Code</body></html> to your HTML-Text-String
- Try to stick with 1-3 Images in total. For example your Logo, a header background and a photo of the particular product.
- Use HTML Tags with care. Set a good looking font like Arial, create listings, link tags, bold and italic texts and restrict yourself to create a well formed/layouted text, which is most important. Don’t even think about implenting an embed or object tag for including flash videos or anything like that.
SpamAssassin checks a lot of factors and is using a point-system for filtering out spam, here is a little snippet:
1.723 MSGID_FROM_MTA_ID
0.001 HTML_MESSAGE
5.000 BAYES_99
0.177 MIME_HTML_ONLY
1.047 HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_16
0.629 FORGED_OUTLOOK_HTML
The heaviest impact is BAYES_99, if your text sounds spammy, you are spam flagged. If you e.g. sell Viagra you shouldn’t list the product name in your confirmation mail ;-). Another example is MIME_HTML_ONLY, this hits your mail if you only supply HTML Text, without a seperated PlainText. I won’t explain every function in detail here, if you follow this HowTo you likely won’t run into any problems.
Let’s have a look on how to properly send a HTML Mail with the System.Net.Mail Class, in this case it is sending the Mail via Google Apps / GMail:
public void ExecuteHtmlSendMail(string FromAddress, string ToAddress, string BodyText, string Subject)
{
MailMessage mailMsg = new MailMessage();
mailMsg.From = new MailAddress(FromAddress);
mailMsg.To.Add(new MailAddress(ToAddress));
mailMsg.Subject = Subject;
mailMsg.BodyEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding(”utf-8″);
System.Net.Mail.AlternateView plainView = System.Net.Mail.AlternateView.CreateAlternateViewFromString
(System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Replace(BodyText, @”<(.|\n)*?>”, string.Empty), null, “text/plain”);
System.Net.Mail.AlternateView htmlView = System.Net.Mail.AlternateView.CreateAlternateViewFromString(BodyText, null, “text/html”);
mailMsg.AlternateViews.Add(plainView);
mailMsg.AlternateViews.Add(htmlView);
// Smtp configuration
SmtpClient smtp = new SmtpClient();
smtp.Host = “smtp.gmail.com”;
smtp.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential(”username”, “password”);
smtp.EnableSsl = true;
smtp.Send(mailMsg);
}
What’s important here: Setting the correct Encoding, in my case utf-8. Create a plainView and htmlView of the mail message. For the plainView I used a simple Regex statement for stripping out the HTML Tags. Add the plainView and htmlView to the AlternateViews Class of the Mail Message and finally send the mail, in my case via SSL, if you don’t know whether you have an Mailserver with SSL capabilities just ask your provider.
Using this construct you send out your HTML Mails as HTML Mail and Plaintext Mail and SpamAssassin is going to like you for that.
I use gmx.net for testing my mails as they are using a pretty well configured SpamAssassin and you can easily see the spam-flags by checking out the Header of the mail (also possible with GMail and hopefully every other mail application out there). An example of this:
X-GMX-Antispam: 5 (HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_12,HTML_MESSAGE,HTML_MIME_NO_HTML_TAG,MIME_HTML_ONLY)
X-GMX-UID: UNbaLmk4ZDI4zQ9QSmY2gY1xemhmY8Gs
A Spam-Score of 5 (=treated as Spam) and it’s telling me that I didn’t supply a PlainText Version of the Mail, after including that one all errors were gone.