Words to avoid email filtering

Ever wondered why so-and-so never replied to your email? Ever wondered why you didn’t receive an important email you were waiting for?

The reason, more often than not, is a content filter. As spam continues to spiral, the scope of our email filters grows ever wider. But what can we do to improve the chances of our email messages reaching the inbox, and not the Junk folder?

Mind what we say. According to online communications specialist, Email Reaction there are a number of innocuous words that should be avoided in email message bodies and subject lines.*

These include in alphabetical order: acceptance, accordingly, beneficiary, beverage, certified, dainty, deceased, degrees, deposit, depression, diagnostics, dollars, dormant, enlarge, foreigner, lenders, lottery, medication, paste, percent, presently, reciprocal, replicas, reseller, sincerely, statements, southwestern, Swiss, tablets, trademarks, urgent, valuables, warehouse, watches.

Spam filters give words a score based on how likely it is a message that uses them is junk. When an email message is received, the scores for the words in the message are combined with other factors (including the sender’s details and how the message is structured technically) to determine how likely it is a particular message is spam.

Businesses trying to reach their customers or prospects who have asked to be contacted by email will find their messages are more likely to be condemned as spam if they use the wrong words.

Even some commonly used business words also have a high probability of occurring in a spam email, including loan, maintained, medium, organization, percent, perpetual, sincerely, somebody, statements, transaction, urgent, verify, warehouse.

Brand names to be given a wide berth include Hotmail, Paypal, Amazon and eBay.

 “It’s extremely difficult for people to second guess what spam filters will consider to be an indicator of junk email,” said Vicky Carne, managing director, Email Reaction. “Companies often run a simple test using the open source Spam Assassin filter, but this tends to highlight technical issues, which owe more to the email template than the message. It’s important to run a keyword check as well to see how the message can be edited to improve the likelihood that people receive the messages they have asked for.”

 * Note: the same applies to attachments