I don't know which I fear more, the spammers or the spam cops. Ezine editors are having to work harder and harder to get their opt-in newsletters delivered. Even regular emails among companies doing business together on a regular basis can easily be filtered out.
Many of you have spam filters in place and don't even know it, thanks to web providers who just want to help.
In addition to my web business, I am the marketing director of an ad agency. About six months ago, one of our clients suddenly couldn't receive emails from us, and the client wasn't even aware their provider had filters in place. I called the provider myself, and was told they used a third party for the filtering. I was given a web address, and had to go through two weeks of red tape, entering data into forms and sending emails to some unknown person (or android, as I suspect).
Finally, after no personal contact whatsoever, and no feedback from the spam cops, the client suddenly announced he had begun receiving my emails again.
A couple of years ago, a subscriber to my previous ezine, OurBusinessOffice, wrote me to say he tried out some free software for spam control, and it showed my ezine as blacklisted! I thanked him for letting me know, but then I was left wondering what to do. Though the spammers are out of control, so are the spam cops.
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Rather than blanket blacklisting, I think a more sensible approach for filtering would be to allow users to have more say so in what they would like filtered, rather than allowing some third party to guess at what we don't want.
In addition, I'd love it if Hotmail would allow me to enter in words that should cause emails to me to get filtered. My Hotmail address gets its daily fill of disgusting emails whose very titles are offensive. Hotmail has a block filter, which I can click on, but the spammers are smart enough to keep changing their "from" address each time, even though the message is often the same otherwise.
At this point, Hotmail only lets me block the address, not the message. While the spam cops are blacklisting words like guarantee, which I don't mind a bit, the titles of emails in my Hotmail mailbox are too filthy to even write here, often involving teens and farm animals, or the size of...well, you get my drift. I haven't figured out why they keep coming, since I never even open them, just delete delete delete.
Even this idea is quickly becoming obsolete, as the new trick of putting odd characters inside words to disguise them, like "fr3e" and "se@rch eng1ne." It's a game even the honest mailers have to play, thanks to a few with low ethics.
Here are a few ideas I've found to avoid being filtered:
• Put the word newsletter in the subject, or the date.
• Use synonyms...say "at no charge," rather that "free."
• Don't put two or more words in all caps.
• Make sure people understand why they are receiving your email. When you send the first issue, mention how you got their name (assuming you received it ethically!)
I'm sure this is a topic that will continue to get a lot of attention, until the government eventually will have to decide on some guidelines for both the email senders and for the filters. For now, I think we need to let our providers know that if there are filters used, we want to be able to have some say in what gets filtered and what doesn't.
The spammers are indeed causing huge problems, but the big brother spam cops are going way overboard to solve them!
About the author:
Judy Camp has been a writer and marketing manager for twenty years, and has focused on web marketing for the past five years. Her web site
http://www.ourbusinessoffice.com provides resources for web businesses.
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