Understanding How Email Spam Blocking Works

email spam blockingAnyone who has an email account is familiar with spam emails. However, most of the people are unfamiliar with the ways to prevent email spam. In fact, you can stop receiving those annoying unsolicited email messages taking several simple email spam blocking steps.

There are various email spam blocking tools you can use. Essentially they all work in a similar manner:

Anti-spam software will intercept all incoming email messages. First, it will block any messages coming from known spam domains. Next, most email spam blocking services will look at the subject line of the email message and its contents. If the subject and/or the text of the email message contain specific spammy phrases, excessive punctuation, sloppy coding and so on, they will label the message as spam and send it to the spam or trash folder of your email client.

Each email spam blocking tool has different criteria to judge whether an email message is spam or not. Also, the threshold can vary from one tool to another. Basically, that means that some tools will need to find more proof that a message is spam than others in order to label it as spam and successfully filter it.

On the other hand, if you are an online business owner running permission based email marketing campaigns, those email spam blocking services can backfire. Why? Because your promotional email messages can accidentally end up in your customers’ trash folders.

Luckily, there are several ways to avoid this. First of all, ask the recipients of your emails to add your email in the contact book of their main clients. Obviously, you will need to use the same email address to send all your promotional emails or newsletters.

Other steps you can take to avoid any email spam blocking filters the recipients of your emails are:

-          Don’t talk about money in the subject line of your emails

-          Don’t include too urgent call-to-action phrases such as “Click here right now!” or “Free! Buy Now!”

-          Avoid using excessive punctuation or any other symbols such as currency signs

-          Don’t use all caps letters

To avoid getting your email marketing campaigns blacklisted as spam, it is highly recommended to use a spam checker tool. These tools simulate the way most email spam blocking services use and are a great way to make sure that any email you are sending is good to go.

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