Your Newsletter Looks Like Spam

That newsletter you just sent out to all your customers? It looks like spam. At least it does if you made a good-faith effort to comply with the CAN-SPAM act. Almost all anti-spam programs will eat it for lunch.

It was sent out to 4000 people, none of whom really had their addresses on the "to line." It was filled with images. The dead give-away was the unsubscribe option.

These are all things spam filters look for when trying to identify spam. As a spam filter author, I should know.

There have been a number of efforts to resolve this problem. One company offers anti-spam software companies and email senders a certification system. The idea is that if their "fingerprint" is included, the filter should know it's not spam. The system has not been widely adopted, and has had significant problems with abuse.

There is perhaps an easier solution to this problem. On the webpage where users sign up, tell them specifically to whitelist your address in their anti-spam program. Pretty much all anti-spam filters support whitelists. If you're on the whitelist - you won't get filtered.

A more technically advanced solution would be to have a standard white-listing file. The user could download a standard file from the newsletter provider. The browser would hand the file off to your spam buster of choice for processing. It's the same mechanism that tells Internet Explorer to send video files to Windows Media Player.

It could even be turned into an automated process. The user could click on a single link to subscribe and download the whitelist file. This mechanism has the added advantage of the user specifically deciding which newsletters to allow. With the centralized solution, users have to trust the third-party to accurately decide who's a spammer and who's not.

Back