Many e-mail providers such as Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo and most others use aggressive spam filtering technology, this technology has a higher rate of blocking genuine non-spam e-mail from sites or e-mail accounts on a shared-hosting server.
 
There are many reasons why an ISP or provider may block, flag or filter genuine e-mail and often, there is nothing you as the sender or we as the host can do to prevent this from occurring.
 
Some of the reasons for this result include:
 
- HTML CONTENT : The more HTML, the less likely your e-mail will be received
- KEYWORDS : Most filters flag e-mails and raise their spam score based on the presence of keywords in messages
- VOLUME : Too many e-mails have been received by the provider/destination from the sender or server in a given period of time
- ATTACHMENTS : Suspicious or large file attachments may cause filters to flag or delete your e-mail
- TRUST SCORE : The sending server, domain or user may not have a high enough trust rank for the destination server, domain or user
- VIRUS CONTENT : The destination server detected a virus in your message or the threat of one
- OTHER : The vast majority of providers employ rules, settings and methods for detecting spam wholly proprietary to their platform of which your e-mail falls victim
 
What is a site owner to do?
 
The best known and most highly recommended solution is to dispatch your e-mails through a third-party provider such as Google which has a higher probability of being received than any other provider.
 
E-mails received by Yahoo, AOL or Hotmail from Google are less likely to encounter a high filter rate as Google is considered a trusted provider and sender to each of these services and smaller providers or self-hosted services just cannot obtain the same level of trust and quality of e-mail delivery as Google.
 
How do you get started?
 
Please can you signup for 'Microsoft Live Domains'.

This is a free service provided by Microsoft which allows you to send and receive emails though the Microsoft mail servers.

It does not effect your email addresses and you can still use your own email POP / SMTP client.  People who you send emails to will not know your using Microsoft to relay the email.

You will get *excellent* email delivery when you use this service and we highly recommend it:

To setup with Live Domains, please visit:

http://domains.live.com

Click 'Get Started'

You will be asked to enter your domain name.

You will have two choice:

Sign in with an existing Windows Live ID.

or

Create a new Windows Live ID in your domain, ex: [email protected].

We recommend choosing :

Sign in with an existing Windows Live ID.

This option makes it easier to setup.

Proceed and complete the signup process, you will need to verify yourself by clicking a verification email.

You will then need to provide ownership of your domain name by adding the DNS records provided on the domain settings page once logged in to https://domains.live.com.

If you need any help adding these DNS records please just ask one of our techs in support and provide a copy / paste of the DNS settings https://domains.live.com required.

SMTP remote mail settings:

-  POP3 server: pop3.live.com (port 995)
-  SMTP server: smtp.live.com (port 25)
-  User name: Enter your full email address.
-  Password: Enter your Microsoft account password.
-  Choose the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) option for both POP3 and SMTP connections.
-  Choose the SMTP authentication for SMTP connections.
-  Choose the outgoing server requires authentication option. (In most email apps, this option isn't checked by default.)


Best regards