SpamAssassin May Be Killing Your E-Mail Marketing - and You May Not Even Know It

By Maria Veloso

Before you press the “send” button on your promotional e-mail, newsletter or ezine -- stop.  First, give it a once over, and see if it has these offending words and phrases:

New, money, opportunity, free, Dear friend, amazing, guarantee, sale, profit, buy now, order now, congratulations, great offer, maximize, investment, powerful, winner, special promotion.

If you've included any of the above words in your outgoing e-mail -- or any dollar signs, exclamation marks, or anything in all caps, for that matter -- then proceed at your own risk.

That's because SpamAssassin, one of the most popular open source anti-spam applications, which has several hundred spam filters, may inadvertently identify your e-mail as spam -- and block your e-mail from being delivered. SpamAssassin enables mail administrators to customize what e-mail they allow to get through, and which ones they want automatically blocked and sent to “spam limbo” -- which means they get redirected to the recipient’s Bulk Mail bin or are purged altogether.

So even if the e-mail you're sending is legitimate opt-in e-mail, your e-mail could be hijacked by e-mail providers or ISPs who are getting increasingly vigilant in protecting their clients from junk e-mail.

“Order Now,” I Understand -- But “Click Here,” Too?

This is bad news for e-mail marketing -- but now for the clincher: Customary phrases like “click here” (or “click below”), “unsubscribe” or “to be removed” are now also blacklisted. That's because these are phrases frequently used by spammers and other unsolicited commercial e-mail senders -- and this is one way SpamAssassin cracks down on them.

Meanwhile, your e-mail could get caught in the crossfire and end up in the same dump. The sad fact is that most legitimate e-mail marketers and newsletter/ezine publishers don't even realize that their e-mail is being re-routed to spam limbo. Yet, they wonder why their click-through and conversion rates are dismal.

So How Do You Get Around This?

You can either play by the rules by just avoiding the use of the offending words and phrases altogether. Or you can use creative ways to conceal the words and phrases from SpamAssassin's “radars.” For example, you could insert symbols within the words -- example: Use “fr^ee” or “fr*ee” instead of “free.” Just make sure you do so in a way that still renders your sentence or thought understandable to your readers.

How to Tell if Your E-Mail “Tests Positive” as Spam

My favorite strategy for sanitizing my e-mail of items that may cause it to trigger a “false positive” with SpamAssassin is by running it through Lyris' ContentChecker before sending it out. This is a free service that uses SpamAssassin's rules to rate your e-mail.

All you need to do is go to…
http://www.lyris.com/contentchecker

…Paste your e-mail text into the form provided on the website, and you'll instantly get a score. If your score is greater than 5, that means your e-mail strongly resembles spam, and would possibly be blocked or filtered by major email providers or ISPs, but if it's less than 5, you can be assured that your e-mail will be delivered with no incident.

What's great about this service is that they'll also e-mail you a detailed analysis of what led to your score, identify the offending elements, and even make recommendations on how to revise your message to conform to industry anti-spam criteria.

[That said, this e-mail is definitely in the “hot zone” that qualifies it as spam because I’ve included in this article all the words and phrases that trigger SpamAssassin's alerts. But I’m willing to take this chance just to prove to you that I’m willing to go out on a limb to bring you this message.] ;-)

© Maria Veloso 2002

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