Gmail mark as spam email with html and anchor links

Question

first of all, sorry for my bad English =(

I created an HTML email, send it to yahoo, hotmail and gmail, the first and the second work's ok, received in the front of the inbox, but, the gmail mark as spam, but it will mark it as span only with I send these HTML codes:

                <tr>
                    <td colspan="2" style="padding:10px; border:2px solid #e3e3e3; text-align:center;"><a href="%%url%%" style="font-size:14px; text-decoration:none; color:#595959;"><span>Clique aqui e confira todas as informações e fotos dessa embarcação em nosso site - ID %%id%%</span></a></td>
                </tr>
                <tr>
                    <td colspan="2" style="padding:8px 10px; border-top:15px solid #fff; border-bottom:10px solid #fff; font-size:16px; text-transform:uppercase; color:#c90000; background:#e6e6e6;">Destaques YachtBrasil</td>
                </tr>
                <tr>
                    <td colspan="2" align="center" style="padding:3px; border:2px solid #e7e7e7;"><a href="http://www.yachtbrasil.com.br/"><span><img src="http://www.yachtbrasil.com.br/img/temp/YB-banner-email-site.jpg" alt="" style="display:block; border:none;" /></span></a></td>
                </tr>

It happens because of the anchor links, if I remove the stuff, it will work and send the email, the question is, How can I send anchor links to not be marked as Spam using gmail? I'm sending this email using a enterprise googlemail account.

Thanks for the tips, I search here and at google and just find the tip after the anchor link.

Best regards.

Answer 1

The problem is fixed!

If you have an email with all the headers corrects, but the email still is not getting to inbox destination, you should explicitly type some anchor parameters, such as target=blank and shape=rect.

See the example:

<a href="link.html" target="_blank" style="style....">Test</a>

Should only contain:

<a href="link.html" target="_blank" shape="rect">Test</a>

This will let the links be redirected to the inbox and not the spam folder!

Thanks for the negative vote in the question, next time please read the question carefully and try to help!

Answer 2

Don't send HTML through email!

E-mail is not meant to contain HTML (despite some conventions) and we, as developers, should avoid doing it. Always should have and still must have, because not all email clients support the standards.

So, we should give links, full URLs with no a href what so ever, at very least. Do not account the email reader will be able to read the HTML formatted email.

That being said...

HTML in email does have its place and usage

Because, granted, pure TEXT is way too poor. I personally think ideally all emails should refuse HTML and accept only some kind of MarkUp / MarkDown, but that may never happen even if Gmail or a few big ones would do it.

Also I couldn't even reproduce your "problem" on Gmail today (august 2013). Using a simple HTML email generator I could safely send <a href="link.html" target="_blank" style="style....">Test</a> into my own gmail inbox.

On an update note, there's now a much related question filled with good answers. Here are 3 links from there that can help you:

• https://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/ just by comparing what desktop gmail and android gmail can do with CSS I would guess google don't have a standard way of handling HTML in emails even within gmail itself!!

• http://kb.mailchimp.com/campaigns/ways-to-build/about-html-email mailchimp is a huge mail marketing service which uses HTML. They sure know a lot about good practices.

• http://premailer.dialect.ca/ on a more practical tone, I've got no idea how they're validating the tool, but you can simply put in you code there and it will throw out HTML ready to be pasted for emailing (I haven't tried it though).