Outstanding email delivery no longer needs to involve witchcraft and finger crossing. It can be achieved by simply following the best practices set forth by the gatekeepers of the inbox – the postmasters at the major ISP’s. Following their rules is a must, so here is a good starting point for email marketers.

AOL makes if clear that opt-in is the only way to go:

• Ensure that you are only sending mail to users who specifically requested it. It is not advisable to purchase mailing lists or subscribe users by having an opt-in checkbox automatically checked on your website.

Yahoo offers a great point - Respect the user's mailbox:

• If a customer entrusts an email address to you during a transaction or for a particular newsletter, they do not expect to receive unrelated messages, such as extraneous marketing emails, in the process. Adding email addresses to other lists without their explicit opt-in is a guaranteed way to lose a customer's trust.

• Honor the frequency of the list's intent. If customers believe they are signing up for a monthly newsletter but start receiving messages on a weekly basis, they are likely to label your messages as spam.

Hotmail reminds that easy unsubscribing is a must:

• The mechanism for unsubscribing, either from individual lists or all lists hosted by the sender, must be clearly documented and easy for recipients to find and use.

Yahoo offers some additional advice for unsubscribing:

• Honor unsubscribe requests as fast as you honor subscribe requests. When a user unsubscribes, they don't want to receive that mail anymore. Promptly removing them from the list should help prevent users from marking your messages as spam in the future.

More good unsubscribe points from AOL:

• Provide an obvious and visible unsubscribe process in your mail.

• Make it easy for users to unsubscribe from your mailing list.

• Ensure the unsubscribe process is easy to use, such as a one-click unsubscribe web page.

• Users should not have to log into a website in order to unsubscribe.

• Process unsubscribes immediately.

AOL also points out the value of having the sender’s from address in the recipients address book:

• Mail sent to users with your address in their address book will be delivered to the inbox with images and links enabled.

From Gmail:

• Use the same address in the 'From:' line on every mail you send.

From AOL:

• When users subscribe to your mailing list, tell them what mail to expect, how often to expect it, and what it will look like. Set recipient expectations clearly.

AOL on the importance of ‘branding’"

• Brand your mail so that recipients can quickly identify it and won't mistake it as spam. Make sure the from address of your mail clearly identifies who it is from. Also, include your brand in the subject line. Even if users want your mail, they may not recognize it right away. Subject lines like "Your daily newsletter from 'Company'" or "Your monthly 'product' update" help the user identify mail they want. Even if you have a confirmed opt-in list, users may not recognize mail as being from you with a subject line like "Buy two, get the 3rd one FREE!!!" and may report it as spam.

The advice above should be used for email marketing newsletters, promotional email messages, and email notices to customers. All of the suggestions are easy to implement, so give them a try, and watch your email delivery improve.