All About The Spam Filter

The first email was sent in 1971, it read something along the lines of 'qwertyuiop'. The man that sent it didn't actually remember exactly what it was that he sent, just telling journalists that the message was, "entirely forgettable". Ray Tomlinson had no idea how big his little project was going to become in future years.

These days everyone who uses the internet is almost required to have an email address, and many people have multiple email addresses - one for work, one at home, and perhaps a few that they've abandoned over the years due to spam mail. Email can be used for personal conversations, messaging clients, or communicating within a company. Another popular use for email is email marketing.

In today's blog, we're talking a bit about emails, email marketing, how an email is flagged as spam, and an interesting headline about Donald Trump's email fundraising campaign.

First up, email marketing. If done correctly email marketing can be super effective. The emails need to grab your attention with a well-chosen subject line, this will encourage you to open the email. The email content then needs to be interesting enough to keep you reading. Depending on the end goal of the email, the email might also need well-placed call to actions (CTAs) in order to redirect you to their website or elsewhere. Marketing emails shouldn't be sent too regularly as people will unsubscribe or mark emails as spam if they're irritated by them. It also needs to be possible for people to unsubscribe - your email address is much less likely to be flagged as a spam account if a clear unsubscribe button can be found.

Protection against spam mail has advanced hugely over the years. While once you received every email that was sent to you, now email is passed through an intelligent filter, which can learn from what you flag as spam, as well as learn 'spammy' subject lines and more. If you're sending a marketing email that you don't feel should be marked as spam make sure to avoid some of the following email mistakes...

DON'T WRITE YOUR SUBJECT IN CAPITALS

While it's true that capitals can grab attention, this is why spam senders use them. Spam filters are wise to this, so they will typically disregard any messages with capitalised titles.

Set up your email account and server properly

In order to protect against fraud, spam filters also look for server-side issues which might suggest a sender trying to impersonate somebody else.

Give your email account a name, don't just use the plain email address

Something very strict spam blockers look for is the sender's name. If a sender doesn't enter a name, opting to just use example@test.com as their email handle, a spam filter may decide a message isn't safe.

Don't get blacklisted

Various databases exist to block spam email accounts if too many recipients mark your mail as spam you could end up on one of these. Various tools can tell you if your email is present on one of these lists, you might be able to appeal the listing, or may have to buy a new domain for a blank slate.

The reason we're talking about spam email is Trump's campaign fundraising email. The guy's been known to challenge the norms with his campaign strategies and it seems to be working. Trump recently sent a fundraiser email titled, "The First One". There are a few tests that can be run which will rate an email on how 'spammy' it is - Trump's email scored high, and due to this 60% of spam blockers marked this email as spam!