Because email is UW-Stout’s official form of communication with our students, it is in everyone’s best interest to ensure that our emails reach the intended audience. UW-Stout’s ability to prevent campus emails from being moved to Junk and Clutter folders is limited. Clutter learns from an individual’s reading habits making it all the more important that readers open important messages and that they themselves don’t pass over messages that look like spam or phishing scams.

Technical Considerations

• Office 365 limits emails to 500 recipients per message, even when using mail merge
• No sender may send over 10,000 messages in a 24-hour period
• Senders may send no more than 30 messages per minute
• Mail merges from Word to email may be slow; please allow several hours for large mailings and monitor progress by viewing sent items from Outlook Web App (OWA) 
• Send messages as Rich Text, not HTML

Content Recommendations

The following recommendations are best practices to help us reach our students most effectively

Send from the organization, not a person

Whenever possible, send as a familiar sender rather than as an individual. Users are more likely to open emails from “Financial Aid” or “Registrar’s Office” rather than from individuals.

Avoid "spammy" content

Don't include “spammy” words and phrases in your emails, in either the subject or the body. A phrase like "CLICK HERE!" or “ACTION ITEM!” is likely to trigger a spam filter.

Don't paste content from Microsoft Word: Copying and pasting from MS Word pulls in styling tags that can cause a message to be filtered. A good tip is to paste the content into Notepad (Windows key + R, type "notepad" and press Enter key) or Text Edit on Macs, then recopy and paste it into the email and then perform any necessary formatting.

Avoid suspicious formatting: Some examples of suspicious formatting

• ALL CAPS
• Punctuation or all-caps in the subject line
• Too many different fonts, font colors and sizes; don’t use anything greater than 12pt font and stick to one font
• Too many images compared to text can make an email look like spam
• Too many links or links to domains other than uwstout.edu can cause emails to be flagged as spam; avoid them if possible
• No address: Including a physical office address can make your email appear more legitimate

A note about marketing messages

Marketing messages carry additional recommendations, like including an "unsubscribe" option, and limiting images; many web resources exist to assist with good email marketing practices