John,

This is a good topic….
I see you’re point and I also see Randy’s
I recently tested this method to see if there was any difference.
I sent out the same email 4 days apart and but I only used The “F.R.E.E.” method on the second broadcast. It kept my Spam Assasin score at zero and got 41% more click throughs. It maybe a coincidence. I’ll have to try it again sometime.
I see your point though. I think that if we put our minds to it we can easily come up with good ways to substitute these “problematic” words without giving off the “spammer” impression to filters.

Omar-Martin
http://www.PLRforNewbies.com

I must agree with you John, and with Ron. It is highly annoying to see all these convoluted attempts to trick the spam filters. To me, comes across as very unprofessional and I have unsubscribed from several lists that use them extensively.

I have yet to send out to any large lists in the IM field, as we are just building our first sites, but I have handled email lists extensively for clients in many different professional business sectors. In those market segments, if you used that sort of technique you would not last long, being looked at with suspicion.

It is my belief that if one is using those problematic words often enough to cause spam filters to react negatively, then it is probably best to look at the style of copy writing as perhaps something that can be improved.

John, as usual, such a timely topic. Just today I was dealing with another issue, but still much the same. I was creating a thank you page and cancel/return page for a Paypal purchase and/or cancellation. Since these only ‘go’ to a buyer, I figured I didn’t have to cloak the email address. I usually do this by either using my contact station footer, or by using a JS script that cloaks it. But the more I worked with it, the more I saw that even a page like this, not really a ‘public page’ is also subject to the spam robots.

And this got me to thinking.

Lots of people use (and so have I) things like:

myself [at] myself [dot] com

How hard is this? Suddenly today I saw that someone out there could easily, or maybe already has…. coded a small program to recognize the two items in brackets, hug the things together, and send the spammer back a report with usable email addresses.

And the same with using characters in your own newsletters, which I admit to having done. In fact, for several years. How difficult for someone to create a small software to pick up on the common varieties being used? And the list could grow. It would catch many of those uses, right away. And suddenly your/my/our newsletter gets tagged ANYWAY.

The suggestion above, that the problem is probably in the copy… and to find better ways of wording things.

It’s amazing what the ‘bots and ‘engines pick up on. Very early in the Internet game, back in about 1997, I posted a page to my university page, with a picture of me and my daughter, then 6, dressed in holiday satins, red and green. Called it Holiday Babes. And I ended up on NO end of lists!!!! The word ‘babe’ has been ‘blacklisted’ forever, it seems. And what that did, late 1990s, to the Christmas season and ‘babe in a manger’ songs and stories, was truly Unfunny.

I’m very glad you posted this issue.

One more comment however… I think the number of links in a newsletter does more damage than the use of many of these words, if you keep them to a useful minimum. At least when I was with Aweber a few years back, they really did not like that. And the [Ken Evoy] Siteseller tool for determining is your letter is spammy, did not like outward links, either.

Now if they would only come up with a similar tool for all the paper junque that ends up in my snail mail box….

Leanne

Well I agree with John, Omar and Randy on this one. If it gets more clicks then fair enough, if it beats the spam filter then great. If it prompts your subscriber hit the unsubscribe button for using n0ne language t-e-x-t then where do you find the happy medium. As a marketer the choice is yours.

Personally, I like to read and send a straight forward email without the use of edited words, however would I have been able to read this email if my spam filters were on? This has been a ongoing battle for years and it will probably only get worse. What would you have? More clicks or a good read? Or would the good read promote more clicks? Would people delete the email with F.R.E.E thinking it was a spammer even though it was delivered to more people?

Its all down to personal preference.

Daniel

When I get email with fr,ee and m0ney or other such things I usually delete them because I see them as SPAM. I figure a good writer could find a way to make their message readable without such tactics.

Hi John,

Good topic. I have thought of this too, it kind of ties into the concept of defining Internet Marketing Ethics. If one wants to be ‘good’ which is better in the long run anyway then how do you determine where that line is?

My thought is, everyone is different. Just like any business, everyone is unique in how they apply and work their business, including marketing to potential customers. As potential consumers, most of us are pretty used to this varied approaches anyway. So, my thought is to “go with your gut” if it feels wrong, don’t do it. If you don’t feel it is wrong, then proceed. Maybe try testing to see what happens to your list. Go to sleep at night feeling you have operated fairly and with integrity, chances are your business will do better for it in the long run.

Cheers!

Jeromy AKA Hillbilly

I agree with John.

People really should know that spam bots are “clever” enough to see right past the trickery. Dan Thies also tells us that there is substantial evidence that Google takes into account the use of the word FREE, (and all the spammy counter measures), when it sits in judgment of how to index our pages or award quality score. Using the word “free” in its natural form is less likely to hurt you than trying to be clever.

I also use Aweber and just sending out emails with normal content and using free, money and so on has not been an issue. To get the Aweber spamometer up to 5 and over is mind boggling. (Note to self; Gotta give this a go!)

Email delivery is an issue and I am not sure it is possible to put a realistic figure on this. My reason for saying this is that if we take Yahoo for instance, (I believe AOL is even worse), there is no rhyme no reason to what it delivers and when. Important non IM emails may get delivered, may be filtered to the spam box or may get rejected or lost so you never see them. Additionally it may take anything from an hour to a week to receive an email. This is regardless of the content and “spammy” words.

The procedure for junk email is exactly the same and may be delivered, filtered or lost so trying to figure out the delivery rate for certain words I believe is an exercise in futility for us mere mortals and even geeks with funds and resources to research this stuff can at best only obtain an approximation or trend.

To me the all important point is that if you give good content people will read your stuff – assuming it gets delivered 😉 It’s no more complicated than that.

Take John for instance. He used a subject line a while back “$5000 in 9 days!” Almost anybody else sending me this and I will unsubscribe.

The thing is with John I know this Subject line is true and there is valuable content to follow otherwise it’s just from some marketing wannabee who doesn’t know Jack trying to sell me an affiliate program they have probably never even bought.

Forget the spam filters and Google though. Readers are becoming savvy enough nowadays to see right past all this nonsense and they don’t need an algorithm loaded into them to instantly spot all variations of Free.

A real pet hate of mine is people using Re: in the subject line to draw attention and attempt to fool the spam filters into thinking it’s a reply. Unsubscribe.

If people just gave out good content and treated their list with respect, then resorting to Subject line / body content spam trickery is not even an issue for discussion.

OK, I think I have strayed off topic somewhat so it’s time to stop.

Ade

Hey John,

I think you knew you were going to throw the cat among the pigeons when you wrote this!
I kinda agree and kinda disagree … does that make sense?
What I mean is that I do sometimes disguise the word ‘free’ as it is a spam blocker keyword and there’s not much point being marked as spam for the sake of a little apostrophe, I know what you are going to say here “use it in a different context” well, I think that no matter how you dress up the sentence with ‘free’ it is still going to mess with the spam filters, I don’t care what aweber scores it at. Another thing to remember is that these spam/filters are all interlinked, so if you’re down as a spammer in one, chances are you will be marked in a lot more.
Saying all that the amount of people we are talking about here is negligible compared to the list size!
Damn, you nearly got me off on a rant there!

Later,

Dave.

as long as i know who the email is from i don’t mind the occasional ‘ or *. i chose to subscribe to their list and i know they are trying to give me a message in the quickest possible way. it’s about the content not the spelling or grammar. an asterix in my inbox from john or randy is far preferable to knowing how adeeb grows his equipment for best pleasure (the latest in my spam box) tom, i really need to lol about adeeb.

Well, just browsing around and you’ve pushed a button here with me John.

I wrote about this almost two years ago on my blog:-

http://www.frankhaywood.com/ever-received-email-with-words-like-free-in-them/

The comments I made then are as true today…

(There’s a link on that post to an article Tom Kulzer of Aweber wrote around the time saying don’t use word variations as it hurts you, with a good explanation of why.)

Your email deliverability is reduced to ZERO using word variations (I GUARANTEE sys and network admins know a lot about marketers and their tactics). Using those variations will mark you loudly and clearly as a spammer to them, even if you use double opt-in and you consider yourself as clean as the driven snow.

And let’s not forget readability. It drives me mental (it REALLY does), to see to see typos in my own work let alone emails I’m receiving from other marketers. 😉

So deliberately adding in mistakes in a vain attempt to get through spam filters is a bad move for both the reasons above.

Here they are again:-

#1 – They get filtered at the mail providers network level so your carefully crafted emails don’t even make it to your subscribers spambox, let alone inbox.

#2 – It hurts readability and the flow of your email.

Just don’t do it.

-Frank Haywood