One of the most common questions we get asked by clients, right behind the ones about getting more traffic to their site and about how we managed to hire so many uncommonly attractive people, is about how to get their newsletters to actually arrive in the intended recipients' inboxes, unscathed by spam filters. Our friends over at ThinData.com, a leading provider of email services, have posted a whitepaper called The Marketer's Guide to Successful Email Delivery. You'll have to fill in a quick form to register to receive it, after which an email will magically wing its way into your inbox which contains a top secret download link. It seems like an excessive number of steps to take, but its well worth it if you do any email-based marketing and would like to take some precautions to make sure people are reading your stuff. Among other things, it covers the five Challenges to Successful Delivery, along with five Best Practices to negate them:

1. Making Sure Email Can Be Authenticated
2. Maintaing a Good Email Reputation
3. Preventing Being Labelled as a Spammer by Recipients
   
4. Preventing Being Labelled as a Spammer by Third Parties
5. Configuring Email Servers to Meet Industry Standards

Highly recommended light summer reading - get to it!