A useful resource to keep in mind when you’re unsure if your ezine or email content is too spammy and likely, therefore, to get picked off by the spam police is spamassassin.org. “SpamAssassin is a mature, widely-deployed open source project that serves as a mail filter to identify Spam.” SA is well thought of and pretty widely deployed in government and industry. Chances are that if your email can pass muster with SA it can pass muster with anybody.
One of the techniques they use to determine if a message is likely to be spam or not is to examine the content and award + or – points depending upon what they find. You generally want to keep your messages below 5-7 points in order to stay beneath the spam filters set up in your subscriber’s organizations.
Here’s a few examples from their test list page:
- Subject contains “FREE” in CAPS = 1
- Subject starts with “Free” = 0.286 (interesting , eh? The difference capitalization makes…)
- HTML font size is large = 1.415 (of course, at my age, I like large fonts, I can read them!)
- HTML has a low ratio of text to image area = 1.245 (don’t send all image emails because a.) they’re more likely to be tagged as spam and b.) the default on most email clients these days is to suppress images so even if your message gets through, it’s likely to be invisible. Because of this, always use ALT tags with your images so that there’s some sense of what’s missing, content-wise, when your recipient reads your mail.)
- Free Preview = 1.5
- Passed through trusted hosts only via SMTP = -1.36 (that’s right, ‘-’ is good so if you’re message weighs in at 5.2 points but your email service provider or ISP maintains a good reputation for policing spam you’ll get points off for ‘good’ behavior. Now your email that might have been filtered comes in at an acceptable 3.84 points)
These are just a few samples of hundreds of items that will get your communications penalized. The good news is that with a little knowledge you can easily avoid most penalties.
- If it sounds like a sales letter, it probably is. Nothing wrong with sales letters but don’t be blatant or obvious or too ‘pitchy’ in constructing it. Let’s be honest, most of us are sick to death of all the FREE, No Risk, Guaranteed bs we’re constantly exposed to. Write good content describing your offer in honest terms and with a straightforward description of the features and their benefits that your offering provides.
- Ya know, #1 pretty much covers it.
Spend some time with the SpamAssassin list. It’s a little tedious to wade through but what you’ll learn will be invaluable in staying on the right side of your list’s spam filters.
