If you use Aweber to manage your mailing lists then you’re probably familiar with the ‘SpamAssasin Score’ that Aweber gives you before you send an email. Put simply, it analyses your message and gives it a score on how likely it thinks your email is to be detected as ’spam’ by email software.

Now the best score to have is ‘0′, and sure enough I wrote an email today to send to one of my lists and it came back with a score of ‘0′…

Perfect - except the email STILL ended up in my spam folder, and by the time I’d realised this it had already gone out to a list of several hundred subscribers.

The offending word was “free” that I’d used in the subject line. I changed the subject to something different, and sure enough it rectified the problem, and the email reached my inbox.

But the upshot of this was that everyone on my list ended up with two identical emails. Not good because I hate sending too many emails to my lists.

And imagine if this had been an email launching a new product I’d spent months working on, and my list consisted of 10,000 people, of which 6,000 of those never got to see my email because it ended up in their spam folder too.

Next time I’ll be sending my emails to myself first before they go out to subscribers. Just because Aweber tells you the email’s fine doesn’t always mean it is : -)

Of course that’s not the only reason to test it first. I recently sent out an email to a list where the formatting had gone horribly wrong.

I’m not quite
sure what happened but my email l>>ooke d someth
ing like this when it reached my
inbox.

I’ve never done it personally, but I also know of plenty of marketer’s who have sent emails to their lists of thousands with broken links in them. Again not good if you’re launching a new product thsat could make you a lot of money.

So always test your messages before you send them to your list!

Have you had a mailing list disaster? Feel free to share by leaving me a comment.