Spam-Check Your Emails

Spam is an ever-growing problem. We all hate it. Recently, Net marketing gurus have written about the problems that spam is causing for honest, hard working Net marketers. Granted, it threatens to choke the email system, but efforts to combat it also hurt all of us.

Actually, while spam is the fundamental root of our problems, the anti-spam measures that large ISPs and important free e-mail hosts (like Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail) undertake are what hurts legitimate Net marketers. Estimates are that as much as 30% to 50% of email never gets delivered to the intended recipient, because it gets "caught" in one of several "traps" along the way.

Much like tuna nets catch dolphins by mistake, spam filters catch the innocent along with the guilty. This free SpamCheck Tool is a quick way for honest marketers to make sure that their e-mails are free of "trigger words" and and other factors that the filters look for.

This won't guarantee that your mail gets delivered, but it will make it that much less likely to be considered suspect by ISPs, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail (which toss you into their Junk folders) and even by individual filters set up by an ever-growing number of recipients around the world.

Here's how you test an individual email or ezine edition you intend to send out ...

Prepare your email, exactly as you would send it to your list. Then insert the word TEST (all upper case) as the first word in your subject line, like the sample below:

TEST Marketing Tip #12: Sell Ice Cubes to Alaskans, Even in Dead of Winter

Be very careful about this. If your subject line does not begin as above, the spamchecker will flag it as real junk email and delete it without a reply.

Then just send it, as a regular email, to the spamcheck address listed here.

If you prefer, you can "cut and paste" it to the form that appears on that page.

You'll get a report back (in seconds, perhaps a few minutes if volume is heavy) telling you how good or bad your e-mail is, from a spam-detector's point of view. You will receive a full, free report of all corrections that you should make to your email, in order to stay out of the junk folders. It does NOT, of course, actually comment on WHAT you write -- first, it's not that smart, and second, the actual content is YOUR business! ;-)

You'll find that if you do this consistently, you'll get into the habit of writing "filter friendly" emails. Another good idea is to encourage your subscribers to "whitelist" you in their email client. By doing so, they tell the filter that they want to receive all mail from you.