Jan06
Avoiding the Spam Filters and Other Email Marketing Tips
Introduction
Email marketing, as many of us know, can be a powerful, inexpensive method of reaching our most active potential or existing customers. It can boost not only our direct sales, but also our credibility and referrals.
One of the major benefits of email marketing is that email is free, but obviously this is the same reason why spam has become so popular and so frustrating. With spam comes spam filters and with spam filters comes the blocking of legitimate email.
In this article I’ll try and describe the basic steps that can help reduce the number of emails you send out that get blocked by spam filters — hopefully resulting in a more rewarding marketing effort.
The right selection of words
Many spam filters work by analyzing the email based on its content and the words used. Many words — such as free, sex and so forth — are very heavy spam trigger keywords. Your priority should be to avoid such words while keeping your newsletter as professional as possible.
Later in this article I will show you a technique that I use to help me detect words that could trigger spam filters that I may have missed.
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\\ tags: Email Marketing, spam
Jan04
This is a difficult category as ordinary users need products that are easy to use and frankly, most free spam filters are way too complex to set up and use. The best products in this class are in fact, shareware and not free. That said, MailWasher [1] is for most folks, the best free option.
MailWasher is an email preview utility that allows you to check your email on your mail server before you download it to your PC. The advantage of this approach is that you can kill unwanted messages including spam, viruses and large attachments before they get anywhere near your computer. MailWasher flags for you any messages containing possible spam and viruses for you to quickly check. It’s a simple idea but quite effective and one which average users find easy to understand.
At the Mailwasher site you can download a free or “Pro” commercial version. The former lacks quite a few of the features of its commercial cousin. the most limiting of which is the ability to a access multiple accounts. However the last free version of MailWasher before it went commercial is still floating around the web [2] and it will handle multiple accounts. It too lacks many of the advanced spam detection features of the current commercial version but is still very effective. Alternatively, try XTerminator [3] which works much the same way as MailWasher and is totally free. I must say though, I prefer MailWasher’s user interface.
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\\ tags: Freeware, Software, spam
Jan04
There are many different spam filters available employing lots of different techniques. In my experience “learning” spam filters that use the Bayesian statistical approach out-perform most other types of filters I’ve tried. Not only are they better at detecting spam they are also less liable to classify your real mail as spam.
This effectiveness takes a little time to develop as the filter has to be trained to recognize your spam from your normal mail. It takes a week or so before results start becoming accurate and best results may take a month or more.
POPFile [1], a free, open source spam filter, was one of the first Bayesian filters and is still one of the best. It works as a proxy mail server so that means that it can be used with any POP email client. Setup is reasonably straightforward for experienced users but beginners may be better off with Mailwasher.
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\\ tags: Freeware, Software, spam