SPAM Filtering for E-mail Marketers

Chances are, if you’re an owner of an e-mail address, you’re bound to have encountered the common annoyance known as spam. An acronym beginning in use in the 1980s for “Sales Promotion and Marketing,” spam now designates any piece of unsolicited electronic correspondence, with the bulk being e-mail spam.

Thankfully, many of these unsolicited messages are now picked up by savvy filters in your e-mail client. However, for those bloggers and content producers trying to send out newsletters and correspondence to their willingly-subscribed users, SPAM filters can create a substantial obstacle.

MailChimp, an industry leader in e-mail marketing research and an e-mail list manager program, has stated that around 10-20% of the e-mail you send gets lost due to improper spam filtering. It’s time to educate yourself about how spam filters work and what you can do to avoid ending up in the dreaded spam or junk folder.

The Basics: How do e-mail spam filters work?

Spam filters organize your e-mail according to specific criteria, labeling what they see fit as spam. Through a severity points system, most e-mail clients filter e-mail quickly and without any human input thanks to a system of algorithms that take into account hundreds if not thousands of different factors. Here’s a sampling of severity point boosters from Spam Assassin, one of the most powerful spam filters for e-mail out there.

If the e-mail or newsletter contains the words:

• Money back guarantee – assigned 2.051 points
• Urgent matter – assigned 0.288 points
• Why pay more? – assigned 1.249 points

If the e-mail or newsletter talks about:

• A large sum of money – assigned 0.193 points
• A specific breakthrough – assigned 0.232 points
• Mortgage – 0.297 points

Spam Scores

As one can imagine, if your e-mail or newsletter’s total “spam score” surpasses a certain amount, it will automatically be sent to the recipient’s junk folder. The maximum spam score is different for each and every server, since it is determined by whoever controls the spam filter’s code, which tends to be highly proprietary.

Now that you have a general idea of how spam and their filters work, you may be wondering what you can do as a content creator to avoid the dreaded junk folder. Tomorrow’s blog post will focus on what phrases to avoid, and more. Check back soon!