Words And Phrases That Trigger Spam Filters

Among the thousands of words and phrases that spam filters look for, many are found within the newsletters you send to your customers. Examples include:

Additional words and phrases that are now being targeted include:

In addition to a rapidly growing list of words and word combinations, filters are also now watching for such items as using colors, particularly red, to emphasize words and will catch partial words, such as free in the word freedom, and consider that an instance of a “listed” word in its scoring.

How Spam Filters Work
E-mail messages are scanned for particular words, phrases and characteristics.

Typically, a “score” is calculated based on the number of hits for words and phrases in a “spam word hit list.” Some words are weighted higher than others, further raising the score. The score is also increased by any characteristics found (such as all capital words, exclamation points, etc.) that the filter believes is associated with spam.  If the message exceeds a certain score (typically around 10), the message is considered spam.

The trick is to keep the score below the magic number by limiting the number of “bad” words and phrases within the message. The problem with this, however, is that the recipient can adjust the acceptable score level anywhere from minimally restrictive to highly discriminating.

Note that a spam filter is designed to identify and reject all non-personal e-mail.

As spam filters have become more aggressive, they have added features to allow users to “allow” certain addresses through by white listing them. This is a manual process and requires contact with the recipient and the recipient’s willingness to enter the address for clearance.

Other filters respond with a “challenge” e-mail for suspected spam messages which includes a code embedded within an image which must be entered by the sender to allow the message through. Use of the image prevents any way to automate the response. A “human” must respond to the challenge message for the original message to be delivered. Imagine having to verify hundreds or thousands of messages.

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The MHEDA Journal • Second Quarter 2009 • Volume 38, No. 2 • Contents are Copyright © Data Key Communications, Inc.
All rights reserved. • Nothing may be reproduced in whole or part without written permission of the publisher.