One relatively simple way to reduce the number of your emails (or your client's emails) ending up in spam folders is to ask them to whitelist your 'from' address or newsletter name.

Many email clients will not mark as spam emails from people who are in the users address book, or on their whitelist, or are otherwise 'known senders' of valid email. However, with so many different email clients out there, it can be tricky to know what instructions to provide for readers to put you onto their safe lists.

We recently discovered, via a comment on the Campaign Monitor gallery a simple online tool that will generate for you a single HTML page of instructions specific to your own sending address and newsletter details. You just fill in a short form, and you get back a full page that lists instructions for major email client, spam filters and ISPs.

From Chris Lang, the tool is called the Whitelist Email Instructions Generator. To get an idea of what it is about, see Chris's example generated whitelist page.

You can create your own, and then just grab the resulting HTML and paste it into your own site somewhere. Then link to it from the head or foot of your emails, or include it in your clients templates for them.

It's a smart tool that will save you a lot of time compared to working all this out yourself. Well done Chris!

Visit the Whitelist Email Instructions Generator.