My Newsletter Keeps Hitting Spam in Outlook.....Please Help!!!

[projectsdesignwear]

I'm attempting to send a newsletter to my opt-in customers, but when I test I keep hitting spam, noy in gmail but in my pop3 outlook account. My concern is that many of my customers will have the same prblem and not realise they have received my email. I'm using this tool to analyse my email:

http://spamcheck.sitesell.com

and am attempting to get a score of less then 1. I have a large mapped image in the body. But I either get
BODY: HTML: images with 0-200 bytes of words
or
BODY: HTML: images with 400-600 bytes of words

this is when I try and change the size of the image, nothing I do seems to rectify this message, and bumps my score by 1.7.

What's the optimum way to send an image? I usually add text at the beginning and at the end.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

BTW here's an example of what I'm trying to send
www.projectsclothing.com/newsletter.php

BTW, great forum:)

[fisicx]

Hotlink the images - don't send them with the email.

However, I'm not surprised it gets blocked, all those images will just clog up the system and I know thunderbird won't even show the images unless I tell it to.

[cmcp]

You're basically trying to send one large image.

Construct the email so the text is displayed as html text with the images aligned next to it.

You're gonna have to learn the limitations of the layout engines, as email clients aren't just a case of creating something in photoshop then sending it out as an embedded image / attached image.

Stick to tables and inline styles.

[projectsdesignwear]

Hi, sorry I am hotlinking back to my own server, it isn't sent in the email. Also there are two html text lines at the beginning and two html text lines at the end.

[cmcp]

But you can't place a huge image in the email and think a couple of html lines will balance it out.

IMO you're gonna have to split up the images and use text where there's actually text.

Clients are going to read that and think it's just a big spam image.

[fisicx]

Hadn't actually noticed that. Sending the HUUGE image (346kB) is going to hit spam filters all over the place. In any case, since you aren't linking from the newletter to the products it's pretty much a waste of time.

[projectsdesignwear]

Using the table to put in the image seems to have fixed the problem :). We use a seperate map file as we currently have a problem with the mapping on line due to the awful wysiwyg we're currently using.
Thanks for your help guys, it seems to work on outlook, gmail, and hotmail and I have a less the 1 score on the old spam-o-meter

[cmcp]

Good stuff. If you slice the image up in whatever graphics suite you use, you can also delate a lot of the white space in the images and replace the text a lot easier with HTML.

Beware of using sliced tables for layout jittering on various clients.

I think what's happened is you've introduced a lot more source code to the email so it balances out a bit more.