Spring is here, finally. The long, cold winter is quickly becoming a distant nightmare and, as the birds return to their chirping and the grass begins to grow, it’s time to think about spring cleaning. But before you go looking for your vacuum, worry not. There’s no manual labor involved in this type of spring cleaning, because we’re talking about spam. If you’re not into outdoor winter activities, there’s a good chance that you’ve spent the cold months trying to keep yourself from going stir crazy. That may mean you’ve been tweeting and liking, and most likely, sending a lot of emails. And even if you’re not an Apple iCloud user, you may have discovered that your emails aren’t getting where they need to be.
It’s a necessary evil of anti-spam filters that messages get flagged and deposited in the junk mail folder. The heuristics are there to save your precious data and Angry Birds game saves from malicious users who want to know your most intimate details, like your date of birth, social security number, and credit card numbers. And sometimes those heuristics flag legitimate emails that meet the criteria set out by those same heuristics. Whose fault is it? Well, nobody’s, of course. It’s not necessarily your fault that you miswrote something in your email or gave an attachment a suspicious name. It’s certainly not the fault of the heuristics, because they’re designed to protect you by looking for legitimate threats. It’s a safe bet that most people would agree: given the choice, people would rather let the legitimate emails get flagged than let one malicious email get through.
So we can all agree that it’s a delicate balance, but what can you do to reduce the chances that your emails aren’t treated as spam? In an interesting little article at KTAR.com called “Are you sending SPAM?” Ken Colburn at Data Doctors discusses the very real occurrence of people inadvertently triggering spam filters by choice of words. Phrases like “100% Satisfied, #1, Act Now!, Apply Online, Best Price, Affordable,” for example, are prime suspects with which heuristic algorithms will have a field day. The answer is simple, the author writes. Use the KISS (keep it simple, stupid) principle.
That’s a bit ironic, since the article itself is a little lightweight, but the author does provide an email address that you can use to check your emails for…spamminess. It’s probably something you’re not going to try more than once, and there’s no mention of which spam filter is being used, still…it’s interesting. The author also suggests sticking with plain text emails, but that solution is simply not practical in a day and age when rich HTML is a de facto standard used for innumerable practical applications in business and personal settings.
The article also provides a useful link to “The 100 Worst Spam Words and Phrases” that discusses some useful dos and don’ts for crafting email. The most important parts of any email, of course, are the From and Subject fields of a message. Hokey email addies and subject lines that scream spam are the first place the heuristics will search for spamminess. “Ignore the importance of these elements and your intended recipient might never even see the email,” the author writes.
Now, some of the 100 phrases provided by the author are obvious choices that most of us wouldn’t use in the course of creating any email message, but the article itself does seem to be targeted at email marketers, so the author can be forgiven for trying to level the playing field, we suppose. Some phrases, however, are noteworthy because it’s conceivable that people might use them in a subject line without thinking twice. Words and phrases like “urgently, hi, friend, for you, information you requested, check this out,” are just a few. In addition, stylistic choices like ALL CAPS, e.x.t.r.a. punctuation, dis or gan ized text and any use of pornographic and pharmaceutical spam favorites “$$$, 100%” are a one-way ticket to the spam folder. Now, when you see this list, you may think the same thing we did: while we might not fall into the traps listed here, we can think of people we know who misspell and/or use single-word subject lines and yes, the evil shoutiness of ALL CAPS.
So while you’re vacuuming out your home or replacing the oil in your lawnmower, you may want to spend some time thinking about the best practices for sending messages, and, while you’re at it, get the word out to everyone you know that they, too, can be unsuspecting spammers. And avoid putting the subject line in ALL CAPS.