Getting Your Email Through the Spam Filters

Doug Williams @ 4:52 am

This blog entry was posted on November 25, 2009.

You can carefully follow CAN-SPAM rules using only legitimate opt-in methods only to find your emails not making it past the spam filters. Many sophisticated Internet providers use Anti-Spam protection that scores your email based on a point system. The more things you do wrong, the more likely that your email may never actually be received.

These are 10 common mistakes people make that cause email to appear as Spam.

Trigger words: Spam filters scan for certain trigger phrases in detecting spam. These include phrases like free, amazing, congratulations, great offer or order now. 20 common spam words
Subject line: Capitalization can be risky, especially entire words or acronyms. Capitalize a trigger word like FREE and you are sure to be ejected.
Attachments: Don’t send attachments. Many attachments carry viruses and are more carefully scrutinized.
Images: Most of your message must be text. Spam filters eject emails when the image / text ratio is too high.
Punctuation: Using punctuation to create exaggeration will also be picked up as spam. Be careful of too many exclamation points!!!!!!!
Color: Avoid playing with colored text to get your message across. If you really want to catch a spam filter’s attention change both the text color and the background color.
Bcc distribution: Keep bcc to less than 10 names. Long bcc lists are frequently used by spammers.
SMTP: Use an SMTP server to launch your emails instead of using unauthenticated email.
Text format: Avoid using large fonts, different fonts, italics or text with large gaps in the words.
HTML: If you send out emails as formatted HTML, also send out as a plain text alternative version of your message. HTML versions are filtered out at a higher rate than plain text versions.

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Filed under: Email Marketing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 4:52 am and is filed under Email Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Thanks for this post! A client recently asked me about the use of “free,” but this post included suggestions that I hadn’t seen much before. It’s hard to present information from 2005 without feeling terribly inadequate and outdated, so this was great!

Comment by Jayme — November 25, 2009 @ 10:45 pm
Thank you for your kind words. I am glad this could help.

Comment by Doug Williams — November 26, 2009 @ 6:11 am

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Getting Your Email Through the Spam Filters

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