Ever Wonder What Triggers a SPAM Filter?
I have always acted in a more formal style in business. I have always worn suits to customer meetings, rarely used curse words (except when I worked in New York early in my career), and addressed my letters starting with the salutation "Dear So and So".
In the growing world of email marketing, the salutation, "Dear" actually gets picked up by SPAM, Junk and UCE filters as a positive indication for SPAM. I guess formal is out in Email.
Did you ever wonder what else triggers those filters and how is the scoring accomplished? Well actually, emails, in particular, are inspected from Head to toe, or "Header" to "/HTML" for indications of suspicious behavior. Some examples include:
1. Does it look like the Nigerian Banking Spoof? ("I Simply need a bank account to place $20Million in for a few days and I will pay you $100,000 as a fee for doing this...");
2. Is the body text a strange color?
3. Is the word Click Here in all CAPS?
4. Does the word Free or Pe*is Show up in the Subject Line?
5. Is the mail from a guarenteed mailer list (new programs that guarentee authenticity of the sender)?
6. Is the email from a company or domain on a white list? (approved sources of emails).
Most filters score positive scores for problem infractions and negative scores for indications that the source can be trusted like white list domains. Each issues has an intrinsic value that could be +10.00 to -10.00, depending on the filter. Each email is then given a total score. If it reaches aboce a threshold, lets say 5.00, then the email is flagged as SPAM. If it score below that number, then it is delivered.
The filter process and the list of issues checked can be fairly extensive, but the vendors approaches and scoring seems widely divergent. That is, there does not seem to be any standard agreements on those items that should be assessed and how important is the infraction if it occurs.
So if you are curious, The link below actually shows the Tests performed by an Open Source tool called SpamAssassin. This is in no way a vote for or against SpamAssassin as a tool. It is meant merely as an educational tool for understanding how your emails could be assessed if you are doing any email marketing. Let me know how your emails score....
SpamAssassin: Tests Performed
In the growing world of email marketing, the salutation, "Dear" actually gets picked up by SPAM, Junk and UCE filters as a positive indication for SPAM. I guess formal is out in Email.
Did you ever wonder what else triggers those filters and how is the scoring accomplished? Well actually, emails, in particular, are inspected from Head to toe, or "Header" to "/HTML" for indications of suspicious behavior. Some examples include:
1. Does it look like the Nigerian Banking Spoof? ("I Simply need a bank account to place $20Million in for a few days and I will pay you $100,000 as a fee for doing this...");
2. Is the body text a strange color?
3. Is the word Click Here in all CAPS?
4. Does the word Free or Pe*is Show up in the Subject Line?
5. Is the mail from a guarenteed mailer list (new programs that guarentee authenticity of the sender)?
6. Is the email from a company or domain on a white list? (approved sources of emails).
Most filters score positive scores for problem infractions and negative scores for indications that the source can be trusted like white list domains. Each issues has an intrinsic value that could be +10.00 to -10.00, depending on the filter. Each email is then given a total score. If it reaches aboce a threshold, lets say 5.00, then the email is flagged as SPAM. If it score below that number, then it is delivered.
The filter process and the list of issues checked can be fairly extensive, but the vendors approaches and scoring seems widely divergent. That is, there does not seem to be any standard agreements on those items that should be assessed and how important is the infraction if it occurs.
So if you are curious, The link below actually shows the Tests performed by an Open Source tool called SpamAssassin. This is in no way a vote for or against SpamAssassin as a tool. It is meant merely as an educational tool for understanding how your emails could be assessed if you are doing any email marketing. Let me know how your emails score....
SpamAssassin: Tests Performed