Email marketers should take three steps to make sure they're following emailing conduct and filtering rules.

Delivering marketing emails to a customer database is no longer a simple matter of hitting the send button.

Major ISPs expect owners of email marketing lists to follow certain rules of good conduct, and then filter out those lists that don't comply so non-compliant messages don't reach the intended recipients. The impact of anti-spam legislation also needs to be kept in mind.

In an ideal world, keeping up to date with all of these rules wouldn't be a marketer's job -- this is a discipline that is best outsourced to a specialist email vendor. However, if you are in a position where you need to manage this aspect of email delivery yourself, here are some basic rules to follow:

1. Publish your Sender Policy Framework Records (SPF)

An SPF record verifies the legitimacy of your messages to receiving email servers. I also recommend that you publish your SPF records for your corporate email servers to protect your mail systems from being spoofed or forged -- a step that will help to protect the integrity of your brand.

Learn more about why accreditation and reputation are necessary. http://spf.pobox.com/aspen.html

How to publish SPF: You need to ask whoever in your organization is responsible for maintaining your DNS records and corporate email servers to help you publish the SPF. They can create your SPF record using this SPF Wizard. The final step in publishing your SPF record is to paste the record created by SPF wizard into your zone file.

After, test the implementation by going to this site. To do so, you will need to know your sender address (for example, newsletter@mail.domain.biz) and the sender IP address (ask your email vendor or IT department for help).

2. Complying with CAN-SPAM

Complying with the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 (CAN-SPAM) is relatively easy. Your emails should contain a valid return address, your physical address should be clearly displayed and your branding should be prominent in the message and email domain name.

In addition, an email should clearly identify the sender and the subject matter at the beginning of the communication. All commercial email (except for billing purposes) must provide consumers with an unsubscribe option. The removal process must take place within 10 business days. The unsubscribe mechanism must be available for 30 days.

You should also avoid gathering email addresses for your lists through unscrupulous methods such as harvesting them from Web sites using automated tools without consumer consent. And do not sell your email lists to third parties without providing notice to your customers and giving them the opportunity to be removed from the database you sell.

All commercial email should contain your privacy policy, either within the body of the email or via a link.

3. Filtering

An ISP may block your emails if your IP address is on a DNS block list, if the recipients of your messages are not valid users or if your connecting host isn't authorized to send mail from its domain.

IP addresses that become known for sending out a lot of spam tend to end up on blacklists, which mean that many ISPs will not deliver messages from those addresses to their customers.

When a listed IP address meets certain criteria laid out by the operator of the block list, it can be removed from the list. It is easy to be blacklisted but difficult to be removed from block-lists, especially if you do not even know at which source your IP address is being blocked. The best way to avoid this is to follow the basic principles outlined above.

The role of email vendors

Outsourcing the functions above to a specialist saves time and frees marketers up to focus on their core functions. Choose an email provider that is on top of all the latest developments that impact on the delivery of marketing emails, including sender policy framework (SPF), sender ID, spam legislation and ISP filters.

The email vendor should also have strong working relationships with the major ISPs to ensure that your email IP address is not on the list of blocked addresses (and to negotiate for speedy unblocking if it gets blocked) and keep up to date with the changing rules ISPs use for filtering systems to make sure that your emails do reach end-users.