Sending e-mail newsletters seemed like a brilliant and inexpensive alternative to using snail mail. And it was, until spam became so prevalent and the resulting filters so draconian in their attempt to stem the flow of digital garbage that it is now difficult to send legitimate e-mail to those who want it. While there is no silver bullet for this problem, there is a free tool I discovered that can help get your precious marketing e-mail through to those that truly want it.

There are many thousands of subscribers to this newsletter that depend on and look forward to receiving it like clockwork every month. However, as spam has gone from being a minor annoyance to major problem, we are finding that increasing numbers of our recipients can no longer receive their monthly dose of ePOWER NEWS.

This is primarily due to overzealous spam filters whose job is to stop the "bad stuff" from getting through and in the process often stop the good stuff too. One of the biggest spam filters (and one that I personally use) is Cloudmark. In doing my research for an article about this service I noticed that in addition to spam filtering, they also had a free service called "Cloudmark Rating For Newsletters." This is designed to help legitimate e-mail newsletter publishers get their issue through to their subscribers. 

Here's how it works:

1. Go to http://rating.cloudmark.com/newsletter and create a new account (there is no charge for doing so).

2. Cloudmark will assign you a special address that you must keep private.

3. From this point on prior to sending out your newsletter to your normal subscribers, be sure to send it first to the special address assigned to you by Cloudmark and then wait 20 minutes before sending to your subscriber list.

4. After the 20 minutes is up, send your newsletter as you normally would.

By taking these steps you are letting the collaborative Cloudmark spam network know you are a legitimate e-mail newsletter publisher whose subscribers are strictly opt-in. This will help your e-mail newsletter get through to anyone using Cloudmark SpamNet (there are over 1,000,000 people that currently do and growing).

Will this get you through all the spam filters —no way. However, it will help with some of them and further establish your reputation as a legitimate e-mail publisher. And since it is free, you really have nothing to lose by doing this (BTW, you better believe we use this process prior to sending out ePOWER NEWS).

One word of caution however. If your subscribers are not truly opt-in and they perceive your e-mail as spam this process could easily backfire on you. This is because the collaborative nature of the Cloudmark SpamNet network (i.e. all their users) collectively "score" your e-mail as either spam or legitimate. So if you have a lot of people labeling your e-mail newsletter as spam because they didn't ask to receive it, well, let's just say it is going to be a lot harder to get your e-mail through!

Spam is reaching epidemic proportions and is affecting everyone from e-mail recipients to legitimate businesses trying to communicate electronically with their clients. There are a lot of reasons why this is not an easy problem to solve, however I am convinced that with major players like Microsoft, AOL, etc. dedicated to the fight we will see a resolution within the next 2 - 3 years. Gosh, when that happens e-mail might even become fun again!