Make Sure Your Emails Aren't Flagged As Spam

Copyright (c) 2008 Paul Smithson

One major problem thatyou can face as an Internet marketer is seeing your emails flagged as spam when they infact are legit emails. When this happens, your emails will be caught by spam filters and a percentage of them, often a very large percentage, will never be read as the recipient will never see them. This could be terrible for your business, so it's critical that you avoid things that might trigger a filter.

One thing you can do to reduce the chance of this happening is to choose your words carefully.

The reason for this is that there are certain words that are known to trigger spam filters. Here are a few of the most common.

- Money - Free
- Bad credit
- Viagra
- MLM or multi-level marketing
- Free leads
- Free preview
- Serious cash
- Order now
- Online pharmacy
- No credit check
- No medical exams

Obviously, some of these are worse than others, but as a general rule you are best to try and use alternatives where possible.

There are many more words and phrases that can commonly trigger spam filters. A little research on the web should bring you some large lists of these common triggers.

Some people suggest you put a period or other symbol between some of the letters in these words in order to avoid triggering the spam filters (e.g. F.REE instead of FREE), but most of the sophisticated spam filters can now detect this, and this will make your message appear even more like spam.

One or two occurrences of many of these won't be enough to trigger spam filters in most cases, but if you have to use them more than that, you're best looking for alternatives to replace them with.

In addition to watching which words you use there are several other things you can do to help prevent your mail from being incorrectly identified as spam.

Make sure the DNS entries for your domain are correct, and make certain you have SPF and Sender ID records. The main reason for this is that ISPs that receive mail often check the DNS records to be sure you are not on a blacklist, so your DNS needs to be set up properly. You should also make sure the Sender ID is correct, as a few mail services now block messages that don't have the proper Sender ID.

The above is not an exhaustive list of ways of avoiding being caught in the spam filters, but it is a great starting point. If you follow the above advice you will be far less likely to end up in people's spam folders and in so doing you will be helping to maximize the number of people who read your mailings.


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Paul Smithson is the founder of Intellimon and the driving force behind the best-selling XSitePro web site development tool (http://www.xsitepro.com). Paul has set up five multi-million dollar companies, one of which is now owned by the BBC. His areas of expertise include business strategy, e-commerce, on-line and off-line marketing, software development, and maximizing the potential of on-line businesses.