Guides

Before sending your email campaign to your full list, it’s crucial to test how your message performs against spam filters. This process can highlight issues related to content, authentication, structure, and formatting — all of which affect whether your email lands in the inbox, promotions tab, or spam folder. This guide will help you use www.mail-tester.com, a free and effective tool that gives your email a spam score out of 10. While it's not foolproof, it covers the major spam signals used…

Email spam filters are designed to protect users from unsolicited and potentially harmful content. However, legitimate emails from businesses — especially bulk senders — can be mistakenly flagged as spam due to content, formatting, technical setup, or sender reputation. Understanding how spam filters work and how to optimise your email strategy can significantly reduce the likelihood of your message being incorrectly classified as spam. Spam is typically defined as: Even if you’re not intentionally sending spam, spam-like characteristics in your email can…

Spam trigger words are terms or phrases that raise red flags for spam filters. These filters are built to protect inboxes from unsolicited, misleading, or suspicious content. If your email contains too many of these words — especially in combination with poor formatting or low sender reputation — your message may be flagged as spam or even rejected. Spam filters don’t just look at keywords in isolation. Context, design, and your sending history all matter. Problems arise when you: Run a spam…

Managing your email lists effectively is key to maintaining an organised, compliant and user-friendly BulkMail environment. Whether you're cleaning up unused data or simply want to declutter your dashboard, this guide will help you choose between deleting or hiding an email list. If you’ve created an email list that hasn’t been used in a campaign and you no longer need it, you can either delete it permanently or hide it from view. Choose: Note: Removing a list is permanent and cannot be…

Adding events directly to a user’s calendar increases engagement, reduces no-shows, and improves scheduling efficiency. This guide explains how to create event links or downloadable files compatible with Google Calendar, Outlook Online, Outlook Desktop, Apple Calendar, and Thunderbird. All examples below include code snippets that you can copy, customise, and implement immediately. Google Calendar supports direct event creation via a specially structured URL. You can create a calendar link that, when clicked, prompts the user to add an event to their own…

If your templates list is becoming cluttered with designs you no longer use, you can hide them instead of deleting. This keeps your workspace clean while allowing you to retrieve the template later if needed. To hide a template from your active list: If you need to reuse a hidden template in the future, you can easily unhide it using the filters. The template will now be visible in your regular template list and ready to use again. This approach is ideal…

When a subscriber claims that their unsubscribe request was not honoured — and further invokes their rights under the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) — this becomes a formal compliance matter. It is critical that this is handled: Under POPIA, once consent is withdrawn, marketing communication must stop immediately. A data subject may also request access to their data, correction, or full de-identification. This guide explains both: Under POPIA, the following sections apply: There is a legal difference between: An unsubscribe…

Email blacklisting can occur for several reasons, but it’s important to understand where the issue originates and how BulkMail’s systems operate to prevent it. This FAQ explains why a domain or IP might appear on a blacklist, especially when using shared hosting, and clarifies how BulkMail ensures campaign emails are sent securely and independently of your own hosting environment. When an email or IP address is blacklisted, it means it has been flagged by a spam monitoring service due to suspicious or…

Google and Yahoo Announce New Requirements for Bulk Email Senders As of February 2024, Google and Yahoo have begun enforcing new email authentication standards aimed at reducing spam and improving inbox security. These updates affect anyone sending more than 5,000 emails per day to Gmail or Yahoo addresses — including many South African SMEs using bulk email platforms like BulkMail. These changes aren’t just technical hurdles — they are essential to ensure your emails reach your audience's inbox and are not rejected…

Many South African businesses rely on open and click-through rates to understand how well their newsletters are performing. These metrics are central to reporting success, identifying engagement trends, and refining content strategy. However, due to the way modern email systems and cybersecurity filters work, a portion of your recorded opens and clicks may not come from real people at all — they may come from automated software known as bots. BulkMail’s platform includes a built-in protection system that detects and filters these…