Filter This

Contributed by Elaine Landau

Congratulations!

You're an aunt. Our dear friend Bertha e-mailed us this morning with the amazing news. Your sister tried to call you, but the lines were down due to bad weather. Check the news. It's been raining for only a few hours, but the damage to downtown has been severe. Enough about that. Even though your sister's pregnancy was hardly risk-free, she did very well for carrying twins. Imagine everyone's surprise when she gave birth to three healthy little girls. Three! And they are all doing just great. Click here to see the digital photo of them. They are small, but the doctor said when their weight increases, he would like them to be removed from the IC unit and put into the main nursery. I promise you, when I get more pictures, I'll send them right away. Hopefully, the phone lines will be repaired and you two can talk. Just think, with three little girls, your sister will have to unsubscribe to Boy's Life and cancel the custom blue curtains.

Gosh! I need to order now if I want to get the third baby's gifts to her before coming home from the hospital. Much love, Gertrude

This wonderful message never got to its designated recipient. It fell victim to the Spam Assassin. Why? The spam police found it contained too many spam words and it was sent to spam heaven. What words, you ask?

Congratulations
Dear Friend
Amazing
Check
For only
Risk-free
Great
Click
Increase
Unsubscribe
Cancel
To be removed
I promise
Gertrude (just kidding)

According to the spam police, if you read this list too many times you will go blind, or something like that. Honestly, if Gertrude had included the phrases "for free" "great offer" "increase sales" "special promotion" "winner" and "this is not spam" she would have used all twenty of the most popular spam words or phrases.

As communication junkies, we are so worried that spam is going to clog up our computer that we are willing to leave the filtering to some anonymous system. It's really convenient, but we might be missing some good stuff, including some amazing birth announcements. Your ISP (Internet Service Provider) or e-mail program filters out annoying communications, but unfortunately they also block vital messages from reputable companies.

Perhaps now when people are learning to use a computer and specifically learning how to use the Internet, they should be given a list of bad words and phrases to memorize and avoid at all costs. Online tutorials and free computer training could include shocks to the keyboard of anyone who types any of these awful words. Not practical, but effective. It all comes down to understanding how these spam filters work.

Simply speaking, these software programs have a point system. "Bad" words or phrases are assigned points. If your message contains words or phrases that add up to too many points, you are spammed, blocked, out of business, so long, why'd you bother?

So how do reputable e-zine publishers and online marketers avoid the spam police? Not using the words seems silly. Some have tried to disguise the words by incorporating symbols into the phrase and replacing letters with keyboard symbols. But if you get too clever, your reader will have no idea what you're trying to say. Then again, some filters have detected this strategy and actually penalize the sender by adding to their bad spam score.

By the way, if you try to e-mail this article to friends and family, it will be blocked. Amazing!

About the Author:
Elaine Landau is a freelance writer, publicist, web site editor, and television writer with more than 15 years of experience in marketing, advertising, and publicity.