As we continue our ongoing challenge of figuring out what exactly triggers spam filters we came across a few new ones and some ridiculous rules that the spam filters have. 

Web safe colours

Spam filters seem to have a certain issue with colours that go out of the pre-set 216 colours that were set as ‘web safe’ all those years ago when computers only supported 256 colours.  Why this is the case still is slightly baffling, but best to be safe about it.  I found this colour chart that will help you keep in the boundaries  

http://www.pagetutor.com/pagetutor/makapage/pics/net216-2.gif . 

Web safe fonts

Keeping along the same lines as the previous point made, web safe fonts also apply to keeping the filters happy.  Once again, a quick search on google brought up a chart for you to view of acceptable fonts.  I think this might rank higher in importance than the web safe colours as you also have the added worry of the inbox converting your well chosen, and nicely suited fonts, to the dreaded times new roman format and completely ruining the look of your newsletter.  And we can’t be having that….

http://www.ampsoft.net/webdesign-l/img/Font-list-WinXP-Firefox-ClearType.png 

Wording

Remember, just because you haven’t used the word in a spammy context doesn’t mean that the spam filters will understand the context of it.  A prime example of this would be recently I was checking a newsletter we had created for spam problems and the system brought up that certain spam filters were marking the newsletter as pornography.  It turned out that a date in the newsletter (1918) had been caught by the spam filters as being pornographic (18). 

mailingmanager is a full e-marketing solutions company that also offers spam filter analysis on its customers email campaigns.  Visit the website or contact the company on info@mailingmanager.co.uk