Keeping Important Emails Out of the Spam Folder

ICR never sends unsolicited email. Our mailing lists are double opt-in, which means you have to request to be added, and then confirm your email address by clicking a link in a confirmation email. However, email providers tend to act aggressively on behalf of their clients to keep them from receiving emails they didn't agree to receive.

Here are some effective strategies to ensure that the emails you receive from us stay out of your spam folder:

• Regularly Check Your Spam Folder
  Make it a habit to check your spam folder regularly. Email providers constantly “improve” their spam-detection rules and implement new algorithms. Sometimes these algorithms can flag emails from us by mistake. By checking it frequently, you can ensure you don't miss any important messages.
• Mark as “Not Spam”
  If you find an email from us in your spam folder, mark it as “Not Spam” or “Not Junk.” This action notifies your email provider that such emails are desirable and should be delivered to your inbox.
• Add to Contacts or Safe Sender List
  Adding “webmaster@my.icr.org” to your contacts or safe sender list is another way to ensure our emails aren’t sent to your spam or junk folder. This action tells your email service that you trust ICR and that our emails are both safe and wanted.
• Contact Your Email Provider
  If you consistently have issues with our emails being marked as spam, consider reaching out to your email service provider for assistance. They may be able to offer specific advice or adjustments to improve deliverability.

Getting our email on time

ICR sends our nightly Days of Praise email at midnight, Central Time. This typically takes about an hour to queue for delivery. By that time, an attempt has been made to deliver the email to the recipient’s email provider. You might see your daily Days of Praise arrive in your inbox at any point in that 12:00 - 1:00 AM time frame. However, not all email providers are willing to accept up to 20,000 emails at once from us for their users. They “throttle” the number they’ll accept, telling us to “try again in x hours.” This can happen multiple times, resulting delays ranging from several hours to more than a day. This means that we have no way real way of determining when your email provider will accept any given email addressed to you from us. Beyond that, we have no control over what they’ll do with that email once they’ve accepted it from us.

That “throttling” is directly related to how many emails from us they believe to be spam. If you’ll follow the above steps to make sure your email provider knows our emails are not unsolicited, then the likelihood of an increase in the number of emails per hour they’ll accept from us goes up and the sooner you should receive our Days of Praise and other emails in your inbox!