Date published: 01.09.08 - not release date

‘Percent', ‘sincerely', ‘statements', ‘urgent' and ‘warehouse' – businesses should avoid these words or they could be labelled spammers

Hazel Butters / Elissa Fry
Prompt Communications on behalf of Email Reaction
Tel: 020 8996 1653 / 07780 687813
Email: hbutters@prompt-communications.com / efry@prompt-communications.com

‘Percent’, ‘sincerely’, ‘statements’, ‘urgent’ and ‘warehouse’ – businesses should avoid these words or they could be labelled spammers

- Email Reaction publishes spam vocabulary to help legitimate messages get through -

London, 22 May 2006 – Did you hear about the dainty Swiss man who watches The Three Degrees - while eating fish paste sandwiches and drinking a hot beverage - to alleviate his depression? Probably not: his story would most likely have been filtered to the spam bin, as Email Reaction’s list of the top words used in spam reveals. Email Reaction is a leading UK provider of e-mail marketing services and technology with a strong anti-spam policy.

Spam filters give words a score based on how likely it is a message that uses them is junk. When an e-mail message is received, the scores for the words in the message are combined with other factors (including the sender’s details and how the message is structured technically) to determine how likely it is a particular message is spam.

Businesses trying to reach their customers or prospects who have asked to be contacted by e-mail will find their messages are more likely to be condemned as spam if they use the wrong words.

Some apparently innocent words that count heavily against a message being legitimate include (in alphabetical order):

acceptance, accordingly, beneficiary, beverage, certified, dainty, deceased, degrees, deposit, depression, diagnostics, dollars, dormant, enlarge, foreigner, lenders, lottery, medication, paste, presently, reciprocal, replicas, reseller, southwestern, Swiss, tablets, trademarks, valuables, watches.

Some commonly used business words also have a high probability of occurring in a spam e-mail, including:

Loan, maintained, medium, organization, percent, perpetual, sincerely, somebody, statements, transaction, urgent, verify, warehouse.

Websites such as Hotmail, Paypal, Amazon and Ebay are frequently mentioned in spam emails.

The top country named in spam is Nigeria, followed by the Netherlands.

“It’s extremely difficult for people to second guess what spam filters will consider to be an indicator of junk e-mail,” said Vicky Carne, MD, Email Reaction. “Companies often run a simple test using the open source Spam Assassin filter, but this tends to highlight technical issues, which owe more to the e-mail template than the message. It is important to run a keyword check as well to see how the message can be edited to improve the likelihood that people receive the messages they have asked for.”

Email Reaction’s hosted and installed e-mail marketing solutions include a unique keyword checker that provides actionable reports for what should be changed to avoid a legitimate message looking like spam. It is updated using seed e-mail addresses that collect spam. This means that Email Reaction users can ensure their message does not resemble the latest spam attacks, even before spam filters have been updated to respond to them.

About Email Reaction

Email Reaction is a specialist in enabling online customer communications. Its proprietary Email Reaction ASP technology is available both as a hosted and installed version. It allows users to manage their entire campaign from planning and testing through to broadcast, tracking and measurement of results. Web Reaction, the company’s suite of web applications, makes it easy to put the web to work by creating trackable microsites and advanced data capture.

Email reaction was established in 2000 and now delivers solutions to an extensive client list that includes Barclays Bank, Pearson, The Labour Party, MessageLabs and Adecco.

Software for review

Journalists can request a demonstration of Email Reaction for press coverage by calling Hazel Butters on 0208 996 1653 or emailing hbutters@prompt-communications.com