Show your subscribers how to whitelist your emails and newsletters…

Recently we received an email from one of our subscribers who is looking for ways to encourage his own subscribers to whitelist his company’s emails and newsletters.

He touches on an important topic. Email delivery is a ticklish issue and many email clients, filter services and anti-spam services are becoming increasingly aggressive.

In some cases it is all too easy for a subscriber to accidentally “blacklist” a sender’s email address and never see anything from them again.

Here is the question we were sent:

“…we are always concerned about being identified as Spam and losing viable email addresses to pitch new products and programs.

I am working on a “How to Whitelist Us” page set. I want to keep it “short and sweet” and give information for the most widely-used inboxes.

I’ve seen sites that try to include text and screenshots for every possible program, plus anti-spam software as well. It was difficult to sift through. (I’m sure the webmasters are also finding it impossible to keep up with current versions of everything from AOL to Spameater!)

I suspect that we have large numbers of people using AOL, MSN-Hotmail, Yahoo, Netscape or Gmail for web-based email, and MS Outlook/Express or Mozilla for email clients. Is there a report that identifies the most widely-used email systems?”

And here is our answer:

One of the simplest ways to show your subscribers how to whitelist your emails and newsletters is through a free service from CleanMyMailBox.

Go to their Whitelisting Instructor Generator page, input a little information about the newsletter name, “from” email address etc, and the page will generate an HTML guide for you to add to your site.

The final page not only provides whitelisting instructions for Hotmail, AOL and Yahoo!, but also for some of the filtering services like SpamAssassin, McAfee Spamkiller and MailWasher.

It’s easy to do. And free is good.