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With marketers viewing deliverability as becoming THE key issue facing email marketing - it's rare to get an inside account of what an ISP does to determine what is spam - and what's not. That's what Hotmail Program Manager Krish Vitaldevara shared at the AOTA Deliverability conference recently. In our first post we covered Reason #1 Sending Infrastructure.

Here's we'll cover reasons 2 through 5

Reason #2 Marketing Practices - here Microsoft judges you on two things:

• Spam complaints - hotmail subscribers use the "this is spam" to complain about unwanted mail. Vitaldevara breaks down the main reasons that generate complaints:
• Relevancy - your email is not relevant or valuable to their subscribers. If you pound subscribers or customers over the head with the same offer repeatedly  you will pay a price in deliverability.
• Bought or harvested lists - avoid the easy way of buying lists. If an email just shows up to a subscriber without a relationship you will generate a high degree of complaints.
• Unsubscribes - make it fast and make it easy. If you don't then subscribers have no other option than to hit the "this is spam" button
• Frequency and volume - ISP's judge sudden, large volumes of email from a marketer with little history as very suspect. They want you to start slowly and build a reputation. For example if you've collected 100,000 emails but have not been marketing to them don't blast out 100,000 at once. Send it in small batches over a month. Make sure you use consistency in the IP addres, domain and the from line.

Reason # 3 List Quality - bad lists and bad list management leads to a bad reputation. Microsoft is known for using old, unused accounts as spam traps. This is a particulary tricky issue to deal with. First make sure you should process bounces (unsubscribes) properly by removing hard bounces at least after 3 reports and soft bounces after 7 or 8. Second you should look at the history of the recipient. If that subscriber was obtained seven years ago and they have not opened or clicked in years - delet them as well.

Reason #4 Monitor and address unsubscribes. If you have a surge in unsubscribes after a particular campaign then you should not just automatically process the requests but look at why the content was unappealing to your subscribers. Here Microsoft is saying that user complaints rise in tandem with opt-outs. Set a goal for low unsubscribes for your communications. If a particular communication exceeds that threshold check the content and change it before you deliverability is hurt.

Reason # 5 Content and email headers. Although reputation is becoming more prominent in how ISP's process email (into the inbox or to the junk folder) we do see them using content evaluation to decide deliverability. First Microsoft looks at your content to see your reputation. They look at the "From" line to see who you are. They also like to see your companies name in the subject line. Consistency here helps.

They also will say that links that look unusual and/or ones that include broken or invalid links will cause the ISP to label it as junk. .