Paul Segsworth

My email ad/newsletter is basically finished (at left). There are, as always, still a few bugs to figure out.

One of the things I had to deal with when working on this project was avoiding getting caught by all the spam filters out there. Spam filters apparently work using a scoring system. Specific word or patterns in an email add negative points to a score. You get too many of these points, and the whole email gets labeled spam.

What do you need to avoid to pass the spam filters? Here are a few of the biggest issues:

1. What's in the Subject Line. This is one of the most sensitive areas. Some things that get flagged are: words in all caps, the word "free", name or email of the recipients, and many other things that sound unprofessional or "spamish"

2. Spam-like content. Avoid words and phrases that seem to be in all those spam emails you get. Avoid things like: "Click here!" or "Once in a lifetime opportunity!" In fact, you need to avoid overuse of exclamation points, especially repeated, like: "!!!!!!!!". Certain words tend to be "trigger words" to a spam filter - obvious words like: "free!", but even words like: "trial", "sample", "quote" and "access".

3. Don't send attachments. Attachments often carry viruses and are usually weeded out by filters.

4. Avoid too much colored text. Spam filters look suspiciously on colored text, especially red, which tends to be associated with questionable emails. Keep the text black on white for the most part.

5. Small file size. Most spam emails are less than 20K, so keeping the file size larger than that avoids being suspect by the spam filters. Of course, if you get it too big, people will have trouble downloading it.

6. Unsubscribe line. Make sure the email contains an easy way for recipeints to remove themselves from the distribution list.

For more information, look at this article at subhub.com.