Being Aware of Spam and Sending Abuse

When you're sending cold emails, you definitely want to land in the inbox right? Ensuring that your emails are received can be a challenge. While we block abusers to maintain deliverability, there's several steps you'll need to take to ensure you're doing everything necessary to land in the inbox.

Steps you can take in VoilaNorbert Sequences to improve your deliverability:

1. Use the Sending Calendar to space out sends
   • We recommend only using the "Space emails out over the day" option so you're not blasting too many emails at once
2. Create a custom tracking domain for your team - it may look complex, but it just takes a few minutes
   • If you have an IT person or Admin who manages your domain, ask them to help out with this

3. Disable open tracking when sending very short messages

   
   

How we monitor abuse

You are responsible for sending authentic emails and following all pertinent spam laws. If our monitoring system flags your account's sending history, we will send you a warning via email.

If our monitoring system flags your team a second time, Mailshake will automatically block your sending. At that point, you'll need to request unblocking by emailing support@voilanorbert.com to discuss your case.

General advice:

There's tons of advice out there, but here's what we've learned is important:

1. If your email address or domain is relatively new, ramp up your sending volume slowly over several weeks before sending out larger quantities of emails.
2. Avoid sending lots of mail that "looks" the same. Lots of near-duplicate emails going out can trigger spam filters.
3. When sending very short emails, disable open tracking. Emails that are light on text but contain images (open tracking adds a small, invisible image) can sometimes be penalized by spam filters
4. Avoid spammy-sounding content
5. Avoid including multiple images
6. Include your physical address in your email
7. Include a note in your email footer that says something like "To stop receiving emails from me, just reply with the word "unsubscribe." Or you can add an unsubscribe link to your signature.
8. Keep your email content clean and straightforward with minimal formatting
9. Make sure your recipient lists were properly collected - we know purchasing lists saves time, but their quality varies, despite the provider's claims.

10. When you get a bounce notice of a spam filter catching one of your emails, see if they offer ways to communicate with them to find out exactly what went wrong (sometimes, there's a link in the bounce message for more information). This will allow you to learn what's causing your email to get flagged - unfortunately they don't provide us that info.

    
    

Sending from Google accounts

1. Avoid sending email from a @gmail.com address. You'll have better deliverability with a correctly set up Google Workspaces account

2. If you're using a Google Workspaces account, ensure your DNS records are updated to include the proper SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records for your domain.

   VoilaNorbert doesn't actually send emails from our own servers, instead it simply tells Google to send your emails. This means that your SPF and DKIM records for Google will work with VoilaNorbert sends.

3. Avoid sending via Google Workspace accounts that are still in their free trial

   
   

For sending with SMTP

1. Ensure you have SPF and DKIM records in your domain's DNS settings. Your email provider should have help articles for how to do this that are specific to their system.
2. Refer to your email provider for their best practices.

Quotas

When you send emails via VoilaNorbert, you agree to ensure your sending account stays within your mail provider's quota limits across all email-sending apps (VoilaNorbert, emails you send from your imbox, apps on your phone, etc).

Your mail provider retains the ultimate right to throttle your account for any reason, after which you will receive notices that you've hit your quota. We understand this can be very frustrating, so our advice is to refer to the above tips on avoiding being flagged as a spammer. The good news is that our system detects when a quota was hit and we automatically pause sending for a period of time before resuming. Once the quota period pause is over, your campaigns will automatically restart.

If you have questions about why you hit a quota lower than your normal sending limit, you'll want to reach out to your mail provider directly as we don't have any control over their quotas.