Bulc Club Eliminates Spam with Social Networking

Free New Service Crowdsources Ratings of Email Senders to Block Unwanted Mail

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16 Best Practices to Keep your Inbox, Voicemail and Mailbox Free of Solicitations

A few years back, era404 was written up in The Wall Street Journal’s online site, WSJ.com, for an experiment we ran concerning unsolicited email. The experiment was to test if those “Unsubscribe” links actually work. Upon creating a dozen brand new email accounts, we subscribed each to a dozen different online newsletters, contests, subscription services and mailing lists. Then, upon receiving the initial emails from those services, we clicked the “Unsubscribe” link.Read More

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But I’m Not Spam

Preventative measures can help your emails from becoming false positives

Your contacts are primarily made of people who’ve asked you to contact them or people who would be interested in receiving your emails.

However, some of these contacts may have Spamblocking services that could mis-interpret your emails as Spam. This is far worse than a contact just not receiving an email. If your Internet Protocol (IP) is added to a Spam Sender list because of this, it may stop ALL emails from being received.

Unfortunately, these “false positives” have to exist to allow spam-blocking systems to function. But there are a number of methods you could employ to dramatically lessen your chances of being marked as spam. Please avoid the following when creating emails:

1. Body of message incorporates a tracking ID number
2. Body of message contains a large block of hexadecimal code
3. Body of message contains one or more lines of “YELLING” (i.e., all-caps)
4. Message includes Microsoft executable program
5. Message body has at least 70 percent blank lines
6. Message header indicates message was sent directly from dynamic IP address
7. Message From field appears to not contain a real name
8. Message From field ends in numbers
9. Message header contains numbers mixed in with letters
10. Message subject includes the term “offer”
11. Message to: field contains spaces
12. Message Reply to field is empty
13. Subject has exclamation mark and question mark
14. Subject is ALL-CAPS
15. Message subject starts with an advertising tag
16. Message From: field contains the term “friend”
17. Subject contains “As Seen”
18. Subject starts with dollar amount
19. Subject contains “Double Your”
20. Subject contains “For Only”
21. Subject contains “FREE”
22. Subject contains “Free Instant”
23. Message contains excessive images without much text
24. Message body contains the term “nobody’s perfect”
25. Message body claims not to be spam

Questions?

Contact ERA404 for more questions about preventing your mail from looking like spam. Click here.

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Spam FAQ

The Wall Street Journal Online (By Stacy Forster)

Is unsolicited commercial e-mail, or spam, illegal?

There is no federal law against spam. Several states, including Washington and California, have strict laws prohibiting certain junk e-mail, and some individuals have won damages under anti-spam laws. Also, big Internet service providers, such as America Online, have sued to stop bulk e-mailers from sending spam through their networks, claiming the spammers are violating the terms of service by essentially stealing the Internet provider’s resources.Read More

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