Getting Past Those Nasty Spam Filters

For anyone doing email marketing campaigns, and I hope that anyone doing any kind of online marketing is, spam filters are one of the banes of our existence. then we have the legalities to watch out for too.  Read on to get an informative overview and well as some tips and solutions.

Do the the past influx of unsolicited email from unscrupulous marketers, we now have to deal with CAN-SPAM legalities and spam filters which will quickly trash the email we send if we don’t do it just right and there’s also the problem of serious legal problems as well.

Here’s a bit on the CAN-Spam act of 2003 from Wikipedia:

The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (15 U.S.C. 7701, et seq., Public Law No. 108-187, was S.877 of the 108th Congress), signed into law by President Bush on December 16, 2003, establishes the United States’ first national standards for the sending of commercial e-mail and requires the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to enforce its provisions. The acronym CAN-SPAM derives from the bill’s full name: Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003. This is also a play on the usual term for unsolicited email of this type, spam. The bill was sponsored in Congress by Senators Conrad Burns and Ron Wyden.

Basically the bill permits e-mail marketers to send unsolicited commercial e-mail as long as it adheres to 3 basic types of compliance defined in the CAN-SPAM Act: unsubscribe, content and sending behavior compliance:

Unsubscribe Compliance:

• A visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism is present in all emails.
• Consumer opt-out requests are honored within 10 days.
• Opt-out lists also known as suppression lists are only used for compliance purposes.

Content Compliance:

• Accurate from lines (including “friendly froms”)
• Relevant subject lines (relative to offer in body content and not deceptive)
• A legitimate physical address of the publisher and/or advertiser is present.
• A label is present if the content is adult.

Sending Behavior Compliance:

• A message can not be sent through an open relay
• A message can not be sent to a harvested email address
• A message can not contain a false header

Note that falsifying header information is a serious violation of the CAN-SPAM Act and generally is an indicator of criminal or malicious intent which can bring the attention of other law enforcement agencies besides the FTC, including but not limited to the FBI, DOJ and US Postal Inspectors.

The content is exempt if it consists of:

• religious messages;
• political messages;
• content that broadly complies with the marketing mechanisms specified in the law; or
• national security messages.

There are no restrictions against a company emailing its existing customers or anyone who has inquired about its products or services, as this constitutes a “prior relationship” under CAN-SPAM.

If a user opts out, a sender has ten days to cease sending and can only use that email address for compliance purposes. The legislation also prohibits the sale or other transfer of an e-mail address after an opt-out request. The law also requires that the unsubscribe mechanism “must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days”.

There’s more and you can read it at the FTC.

Now that we’ve covered that basic of the CAN-SPAM Act which really isn’t a problem for ethical marketers, we also run against the problem of ’spam filters.’ Spam filters watch for certain words, symbols and the combination thereof and decide whether your email is spam or legitimate.

The following list I came across among my notes and it lists problem words, characters and combinations that you need to be especially concerned with. (can’t remember where the list came from, sorry… if anyone knows, please drop me a line and let me know so that I can attribute it)

• First 8 characters of the From address are digits
• Subject contains “advertisement” or “adv”
• Body contains “money back”
• Body contains “cards accepted”
• Body contains “spam removal instructions”
• Body contains “extra income”
• Subject contains “!” AND Subject contains “$”
• Subject contains “!” AND Subject contains “free”
• Body contains “,000″ AND Body contains “!!” AND Body contains “$”
• Body contains “Dear friend”
• Body contains “for free?”
• Body contains “for free!”
• Body contains “Guarantee” AND Body contains “satisfaction” OR “absolute”
• Body contains “more info” AND Body contains “visit ” AND Body contains “$”
• Body contains “SPECIAL PROMOTION”
• Body contains “one-time mail”
• Subject contains “$$”
• Body contains “$$$”
• Body contains “order today”
• Body contains “order now!”
• Body contains “money-back guarantee”
• Body contains “100% satisfied”
• To address contains “friend@”
• To address contains “public@”
• To address contains “success@”
• From address contains “sales@”
• From address contains “success.”
• From address contains “success@”
• From address contains “mail@”
• From address contains “@public”
• From address contains “@savvy”
• From address contains “profits@”
• From address contains “hello@”
• Body address contains “m-l-m”
• Body address contains “@m-l-m”
• Body address contains “///////////////”
• Body contains “check or money order”
• Body contains “click here” or “click below” (try using “visit here” instead)

No doubt this is not a complete list.  I know that you can add ‘no cost’ and ‘no charge’ as triggers too.

I’m on quite a number of email lists and of course have my own lists and I have seen some creative ways around using some of the ‘key’ words, especially ‘free’. 

One of the best things that you can do is to make sure that when your subscribers sign up, you tell them to ‘whitelist’ your email address.  Most of the time this takes care of any problems.

Another thing is to use an autoresponder service that will automatically ’spam check’ you email.  I know that Aweber does this because this is the service I use.  Everytime I write an email is gives me a numerical score to let me know where I am sitting in relation to possibly spam problems.  It points out the specific problem areas so that I can fix them.

Anyway, this was your little info lesson on some of the hazards of email marketing problems you need to be aware.  Bottom line, just follow the rules, watch your wording and you’ll do fine.

One more thing, something that many online marketers have gone to is publishing their ezines or newsletters online rather than sending via email.  They will just send an email and say the latest issue has been published with a link to it.  This works great and is something I have used in the past so that’s a quick and easy way around everything.  The biggest drawback I have found with this is that sometimes people want their info now and don’t feel like clicking on links to go get it so often the click thru rates may not be optimal.

Good luck emailing!

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