If you send out email newsletters or even just emails to business associates or clients, the last thing you want is for your email to wind up in the junk file, sight unseen. To prevent that from happening, you need to know a little about how spam filters work.

How spam filters work
Spam filters get more sophisticated every day. However, they haven’t reached the level we would call “expert”. For that reason, they operate pretty much the same way a human does who needs to do a job but hasn’t developed his or her own expertise.

They follow “rules of thumb”
Here are some basic rules of thumb they use. If you avoid these practices in your email “subject line”, you have a pretty good chance of staying out of the junk file:

• Using the word “free”
• Using all caps
• Using the word “sale”
• Using any word that could be interpreted as a part of the male or female anatomy
• Using the word “guarantee”
• Using all caps for any of the words in this list
• Using “money back guarantee”
• Using “while supplies last”
• Using “while you sleep”
• Using “what are you waiting for”
• Using faked words such as “fr^e” or “s^le”

This is a subject that is way too big to cover in just one blog. There are also a great number of “rules” to avoid when writing your email. To learn more about how to avoid spam filters, try some of these resources:

Three helpful articles by online marketing expert Ralph F. Wilson

Anti-Spam Approaches

http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt8/spam_approaches.htm

20 Ways to Outsmart Spam Filters

http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt8/spamfilter_avoidance.htm

250 Words & Phrases That Trigger Some Spam Filters

http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt8/spamfilter_phrases.htm

Good resource sites
CAUCE (Coalition against unsolicited commercial email). It’s free to join and probably a good thing to do.
http://www.cauce.org/

Anti-Spam resource site
http://spam.abuse.net/

SpamCon Foundation to reduce spam
http://www.spamcon.org/

SpamCop (different group) to report spam
http://spamcop.net/ Electronic Frontier Foundation’s position on junk email
http://www.eff.org/effector/HTML/effect14.31.html#II

Originally posted 2007-11-03 08:33:14. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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