The Big Spam Theory

When Gary Thuerk sent out 600 simultaneous emails in 1978 advertising his company’s new computer system, he rightly became known as the ‘father of spam email‘. His message read “We invite you to come see the 2020 and hear about the DECSystem-20 family”. Unwillingly, perhaps, those 600 addressees could also be seen as the first email list. However, the Adam and Eve of the spam email world are undoubtedly Laurence Canter and his wife Martha Siegel, although after you’ve heard what they did you might rather call them Bonnie and Clyde. Spam email as we know it began on April 12, 1994, when Canter and Siegel, two lawyers, bombarded the Internet with millions of e-mails in a matter of hours offering their services to immigrants looking to find permanent residence in the US. Astonishingly, Canter and Siegel got away with only their internet and public pride revoked, and actually managed to make a $100,000 from their ‘email campaign’ (not counting the proceeds from their subsequent book How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway).

But what are we legitimate email marketers supposed to do to stop us from being banded from these cowboys and conmen? To those outside the business, email marketing can be used interchangeably with spam email, but obvious it isn’t. Most email marketers are aware of the ins and outs of permission based (or opt-in) email marketing, but the increasing severity of spam filters makes it hard for us to take advantage of an efficient and perfectly legitimate form of direct marketing.

Here are three key tips to avoiding spam filters:

• Don’t send emails that are heavily graphics based. In the past few years, spammers have taken to burying their messages in large images, and because computers can’t see and humans can, the spam email goes undetected. Email providers have taken a shotgun approach, and spam filters will block emails which contain large images or a large amount of images, so rely on clear and concise content instead.

• Avoid using too much punctuation or capitalisation in your subject lines or emails. Like images, spammers are able to hide their message in code, so whilst the word cash spelt like ca5h or ca$h means nothing to a computer, the message is still legible by a human. Again, most spam filters now will simply reject emails which use words imbedded with too many numbers or punctuation.

• Be sure to include a familiar From name and a catchy subject line. As spam email becomes more elusive and email providers come up with new and innovative ways of improving their spam filters, the idea of whitelists and blacklists becomes even more popular. These enable the recipient to choose who they want to receive email from rather than who’s to delete, so if your emails aren’t familiar or seem irrelevant, you may end up on the blacklists as well.

By: Ryan Owen Gibson

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Ryan Owen Gibson is a copywriter for Design Logix, a full-service web agency providing dedicated web hosting, web design and email marketing solutions. www.design-logix.co.uk