Avoid spam filters

When you send Trumba email to advertise 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 attract the kind of attention that you don't want—that is, attention from filters that interpret your promotional text as unwanted spam and prevent it from reaching your audience.

This topic provides some tips for increasing the liklihood that your messages will 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 a completely different place, where it does not reach the recipient at all.

Many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use spam filters, such as Spam Assasin or others. In addition, anyone can set up email filtering on his or her 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 contain enough words that earn spam points to be filtered out and not delivered to the recipient.

Lower your message's chances of being filtered

Email from Trumba Connect 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 Trumba Connect. When you're creating events and email in Trumba Connect, content that will be analyzed by spam filters originates in these areas:

• All single- or multi-line text fields in events, but particularly event descriptions and notes. Email subject lines in reminder or single-event email are generated from event description 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 Trumba Connect. You can set up a simple testing environment by signing up for a few free email accounts and sending your Trumba email (using the Send One-time Email feature) to these test accounts before you send it to your distribution list. Google Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and MSN Hotmail are popular free services.

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 do not receive the Trumba email that you sent to your own test account, you can compare words and phrases in your events with a list of watch words, phrases, or techniques that trigger spam filters, edit your message or event fields, and 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 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 Trumba email can create subject lines from event descriptions 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 will find hundreds of websites that list some of the words and phrases that cause spam filters to add points to your message or filter it out completely. The lists below include some examples, but are not exhaustive lists. In addition, the lists change as spam filters evolve with new spam techniques.

Search Engine Listings

Phrases that can trigger some spam filters or start adding spam points to email you send include: