Return Path have an interesting post up about content filtering. I like the model of 3 different kinds of filters, in fact it’s one I’ve been using with clients for over 18 months. Spamfiltering isn’t really about one number or one filter result, it’s a complex interaction of lots of different heuristics designed to answer the question: do recipients want this kind of mail?
In addition to posting some of my thoughts about how delivery and marketing have different and possible contradictory constraints, I asked folks on the Only Influencers list what they thought. They had some different perspectives, primarily being marketers. One person even welcomed me to the dark side.
The general response from the marketing side of things appeared to be that ISPs need to stop actually filtering marketing email. That would resolve the problems from the marketers perspective. I don’t necessarily think that will help. I believe if marketers had unfettered access to the inbox, most inboxes would be totally un-useable.
My thinking triggered other folks to consider delivery and marketing and what drives both. George Bilbrey, from Return Path, posted an article in Mediapost looking at why good delivery is an important part of a good marketing strategy.
George points out many marketers really do act as if delivery is separate and detrimental to good marketing.
There’s been quite a bit of traffic on twitter this afternoon about a recent blog post by Hubspot identifying trigger words senders should avoid in an email subject line. A number of email experts are assuring the world that content doesn’t matter and are arguing on twitter and in the post comments that no one will block an email because those words are in the subject line.
As usually, I think everyone else is a little bit right and a little bit wrong.
The words and phrases posted by Hubspot are pulled out of the Spamassassin rule set. Using those words or exact phrases will cause a spam score to go up, sometimes by a little (0.5 points) and sometimes by a lot (3+ points). Most spamassassin installations consider anything with more than 5 points to be spam so a 3 point score for a subject line may cause mail to be filtered.
The folks who are outraged at the blog post, though, don’t seem to have read the article very closely. Hubspot doesn’t actually say that using trigger words will get mail blocked. What they say is a lot more reasonable than that.
Melinda Plemel has a post on the Return Path blog discussing delivery to Gmail.
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