Avoid spam filters

When you send 25Live email to promote your events or remind friends to attend, you want your messages, as well as the events themselves, to generate excitement. In doing that, though, you might also attract attention from filters that interpret your promotional text as unwanted spam and prevent it from reaching your audience.

Here are some tips for increasing the likelihood that your messages reach your intended recipients.

• What are spam filters and how do they work?
• Lower your message's chances of being filtered
• Practices, words, and phrases that can make your email look like spam

What are spam filters and how do they work?

Spam filters are programs that analyze each incoming email message to determine whether the message is spam. If the filter decides that the message is spam, it reroutes the message, either to the recipient's Junk mail folder or to another place, where it doesn't reach the recipient at all.

Many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use spam filters, such as Spam Assasin or others. In addition, people set up email filtering on their own computer.

Spam filters scan the subject and body of the email, looking for words or phrases that are known as spam triggers or watch words, to determine whether a message is spam. Filters can also analyze the email header and the number of people on the distribution list.

Many of the more sophisticated filters use a point system, in which the spam filter identifies words, phrases, or techniques commonly used in spam and assigns a score to each. Even if an email message doesn't contain a blatant spam word or phrase, it can earn enough spam points to be filtered out and not delivered to the recipient.

Lower your message's chances of being filtered

Email from 25Live Publisher includes scheduled or one-time email, reminder email, or single-event email. It also includes email that visitors send by taking action on events on your published calendar.

Depending on the type of email you send, text you use in event fields can appear in the body or subject line of your email message sent from 25Live Publisher. When you create events and email in 25Live Publisher, content that is analyzed by spam filters originates in these areas:

• All single- or multi-line text fields in events, but particularly event titles and descriptions. (Email subject lines in reminder or single-event email are generated from event title text.)
• The body of one-time or scheduled email messages, where you type your personal message.

Test your email

A good way to find out if your message is being delivered is to test the email you send from 25Live Publisher. You can set up a simple testing environment by signing up for a few free web-based email accounts, such as with Google Gmail. You can then send your 25Live email (using the send a one-time email message feature) to these test accounts before you send it to your distribution list.

Tip Because distribution lists are associated with calendars, you might want to set up a separate email testing calendar, to which you copy events that you want to send by email. (You can copy multiple events if you display your calendar in List view.) By using a separate calendar, you don't need to keep changing the distribution list when you want to test.

If you don't receive the 25Live email that you sent to your own test account, you can compare the content in your events with a list of practices, words, and phrases that can make your email look like spam, edit your message or event fields, and then try again.

If you pay for your email service and use an email client, such as Microsoft Outlook, experiment with your paid account and the client's filter options as you do with your free web-based accounts.

Finally, you might want to search the web for spam filter products to become more familiar with what's available and how the different products work.

Practices, words, and phrases that can make your email look like spam

In general, the following practices can trigger spam filters. Remember that 25Live email can create subject lines from event titles and put additional event information in the message body.

• Using quotation marks, asterisks, dollar signs, or exclamation points in subject lines.
• Using all capital letters (shouting).
• Including a toll-free number in the subject line.
• Using a large font size in message body text.

Common phrases that ISPs and mail clients filter out

If you search the web for the keywords email, spam, filter, and trigger, you'll find hundreds of websites that list the words and phrases that cause spam filters to add points to your message or filter it out completely. The list below includes some examples, but are not exhaustive. In addition, the list changes as spam filters evolve with new spam techniques.