Spamfilters: a marketer's best friend

I was cleaning out my spam folder this afternoon. I try and do it at least once a day, otherwise the volume gets so bad I don’t actually look at the mail I just mark it all as read. I realized, though, that spamfilters are actually a marketer’s best friend.
If there were no spam filters keeping all the crap people get out of their inbox (in my case over 1000 messages a day) then spam would overwhelm even the most dedicated email junkie. I couldn’t do my job without my spam filters, and in fact the recent rash of virus spew is ending up in my inbox and making finding real mail a problem. I do a lot of sorting before mail ever hits my inbox, and I’m still struggling to deal with the couple hundred “your order has shipped!” and “please her tonight!” emails that my local bayesian filters haven’t caught up to, yet.
Today’s stats:
Work inbox: 17 messages
Work spam: 419
95.9% spam
Personal inbox: 40
Personal spam: 975
95.9% spam
Without filters, I couldn’t accurately find that 4.1% of real mail that I get. Without filters, I couldn’t do my job. Without filters, I couldn’t find the real receipts from purchases I actually made. Without filters, I couldn’t read and respond to mail I wanted.
A mailbox overflowing with spam is unuseable, and email marketers should be thankful that providers work so hard to keep spam out. Otherwise, email wouldn’t be useful for anything.

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Email is not direct mail

Had an interesting talk with a colleague at a BBQ this weekend. He was at a large ISP and then moved on to do delivery at a large email marketing company. This marketing company was started by a very successful direct (snail mail) marketer. The CEO believed totally in testing and they measured everything. They knew what colors provoked a better response and which fonts were better received by recipients.
But this wasn’t always enough. They had some spotty delivery and my friend was hired to try and solve the delivery problems. He had some luck and did fix a number of things, but there was a deeper issue he couldn’t address: that email is not direct mail. The types of testing done is the type of testing for direct mail. They were so focused on getting the best response to a particular offer they refused to consider tweaking an offer from their “proven ideal” to stop triggering content filters at some large ISPs. So their ideal offers would sometimes end up in the inbox and sometimes in the bulk folder and sometimes just disappear.
With direct mail, the USPS is required by law to deliver mail to the addressee. Not only that there are a lot of barriers put up to prevent (or discourage) recipients to opt-out of receiving direct mail. This isn’t the case in email. Not only is their no requirement for an ISP to deliver email to recipients, there is actually a law that says that recipients must be able to opt-out from receiving future emails.
Direct marketers are used to having a lot of freedom and control over their mail. They can buy and sell address lists and send almost anything they want without having anyone tell them they can’t. That mindset translates badly into the email space where the ISPs and the recipients have a lot of control over their incoming email. It means that senders with the absolute perfect test copy see delivery problems because their perfect copy looks just like something a spammer would do and gets caught in content filters. It means they come into email and try to buy a list and discover that while it may be financially viable, they have to deal with angry upstreams, blocks at recipient ISPs and sometimes a Spamhaus listing.
Email isn’t the same as direct mail and attempting to map direct mail techniques onto email usually doesn’t work.

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Creating effective links

CampaignMonitor blogged today about an email they sent out that triggered the Thunderbird “this might be a scam” filter.

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Delivery lore

Number of people believing outrageous statements on the Internet
(Image from Bad Astronomy)
Almost every delivery consultant, delivery expert or deliverability blog offers their secrets to understanding spam filters. As a reader, though, how do you know if the author knows what they’re talking about? For instance, on one of the major delivery blogs had an article today saying that emails with a specific subject line will not get past spam filters.
This type of statement is nothing new. The lore around spam filters and what they do and do not do permeates our industry. Most of the has achieved the status of urban legend, and yet is still repeated as gospel. Proof? I sent an email with the subject line quoted in the above blog post to my aol, yahoo, gmail and hotmail accounts. Within 3 minutes of sending the email it was in the inbox of all 4 accounts
I can come up with any number of reasons why the email ended up in my inbox, rather than being caught by spam filters as the delivery expert originally claimed. But none of those reasons really matter. The expert in question is spreading delivery lore that is demonstrably false. Emails with that subject line will get through spam filters. I even added an extra 4 exclamation points in the subject line.
Not all delivery lore is true. In fact, most lore involving “always” “all” “never” or “none” is not going to be true. Just because you read it on the internet, and because it came from someone claiming to know what they’re talking about does not absolve individual senders from critically thinking about the information.

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