The Two Unknown SPAM Issues In Emails – Punctuation and Mixed Content

Mail Servers and Firewalls are all built not to let you know the reason that your emails are being blocked.

Over the last few months, we have detected 2 more – Subject Line Punctuation and Mixed Content

Subject Line SPAM Triggers

Having words that are generally associated with spam, especially in our sector of investments and fundraising trigger words has always been a marketers challenge. Turns out there is something else to worry about – Punctuation. Overusing punctuation to highlight things will let will take your emails into spam. A good example is when a subject line has used two hyphens or that two colons have been used. So the SPAM filters seem to be picking out emails subject lines that are not resembling normal sentences. Bloomberg has a very elegant but simple solution. If you look at that, headlines, it’s only two or three words, maybe four at a stretch – and they have worked this out. But interestingly, they get more emails opened, the less number of words they are in their subject. So it kind of stands to reason if they’re doing that on an industrial scale it should also work for the fund marketer as well!

Mixed Content

Another massive problem that we have found is the mixing of HTTP and HTTPS content. So those of you who are not familiar with what those mean HTTP is unsecured content like unsecured links and unsecured images. HTTPS is where the content is encrypted which includes links to a website or links to an image, or any other type of digital asset. An email that contains digital assets that are dispersed with both secure and non-secure content will have a detriment on email delivery. The reason it triggers an alert is that most spammers won’t spend the money having a digital certificate. So they just use scammed HTTPS content with their own HTTP insecure content. The simple solution – make sure all your content is on HTTPS and preferably hosted on the same domain that the email is being sent from.