Practice what you preach

About an hour after posting the recent article about the words most likely to get your email message regarded as spam by content filters, guess what?

I discovered an email I had sent almost three weeks previously hadn’t arrived. I only became aware of the non-delivery when I received a message asking when I was going to send the attachment I had promised.

After forwarding the original message, I decided to check the content of the Word document attachment. And there were the offenders right under my nose: Playstation and X Box 360. So obvious after the event. The workaround was to change the prohibited words to Playstashun and X thing 360 and send the document once more.

Don’t know when I’ll ever learn. I once headed an article about keyword spamming as Sex, Porn and Britney Spears, but cunningly substituted this in the emailed version to Six, Prawns and Britney Spears. Suitably smug about my efforts to circumvent the email filter I sat back for feedback and waited and waited. Eventually, I phoned to check if the email had arrived. It hadn’t.

A resend didn’t appear either. In the end, the non-delivery was pinned down to me having left Britney Spears in the text.

From now on, I’m going to check the Read Receipt box and request a response for every message. Until now I’d always felt this was a bit lame or made out you were full of self importance. Now I’m not so sure. To be on safe side, though, I’ll add a wee line explaining about the read receipt in my email signature. Or is this going to be perceived as even more sad?

   * Ed: Have you thought about carrier pigeons?