There comes an inevitable point in some of my longer term consulting gigs where my client asks me some version of the following question:
I still get spam in my inbox, so why is the email I send blocked?
So what is your best answer?
… or Why do spam filters sometimes have some very strange ideas?
It’s been dogma for a long time that if you’re doing email marketing you should avoid using a .biz domain in your mails. Even if your main website was in .biz, you should use something different in your messages, perhaps a website you buy solely for use in email that redirects to your real .biz website. Last year I looked at why that was, and what could be done about it.
One main reason for avoiding it has been resolved (so if you’ve been avoiding using .biz URLs in your mail now might be a good time to re-test that decision). And enough time has gone by that I can share the ugly reasons as to why .biz was considered a sure sign of spam without good reason for so long without upsetting everyone.
The simple reason was SpamAssassin. SpamAssassin is very widely used to filter mail, both in it’s open source version and buried anonymously deep inside countless commercial spam filters and filtering appliances. Not only that, but SpamAssassin is readily available, so most people looking to do pre-mailing content checks or looking at why content-based filters are objecting to a particular email will use SpamAssassin as their model. It’s very widely deployed, and influential far beyond the size of it’s deployed base.
SpamAssassin is a score-based spam filter – it checks an email against hundreds of rules, adds up the scores of each rule that matches and, in typical setups, decides the mail is spam if the total score is five or more. Pretty reasonable, but here are a few of the rules and scores (from the 2006 version of SpamAssassin)
Mark Brownlow has an interview with the author of Email Marketing For Dummies. It is a great summary of the book and gives some good hints to anyone interested in starting to use email as a marketing and customer retention tool.
Read MoreI’ve been working on a document discussing laws relevant to email delivery and have found some useful websites about laws in different countries.
US Laws from the FTC website.
European Union Laws from the European Law site.
Two documents on United Kingdom Law from the Information Commissioner’s Office and the Data Protection Laws
Canadian Laws from the Industry Canada website.
Australian Laws from the Australian Law website