I was testing out an email campaign with Outlook 2007, and couldn’t figure out why it was going to the junk folder. It was a more formal email going out to the media announcing a press release. I was careful to not use the “spammy” words and even ran a Barracuda test in our system, but nothing was jumping out at me that would result it to it going to the junk folder. Ahh, why wasn’t this going through?! I pulled apart the email sentence by sentence and added each piece into another test article. The test article included email copy that I had sent to a co-worker about arranging a meeting time, and it went to the inbox when it was by itself. It even went through to the inbox when I had added all of my copy from the email I wanted to broadcast to the media. But once I pulled out the email to my co-worker, it goofed up again. I probably spent about 3 hours testing this campaign. It would be rather humiliating to send a campaign to the media about a new feature, if the email I sent them went to their junk folder. So to make a long story short, I FINALLY figured out what the issue was…the greeting I used for the media email was “Hello”, and the email to my co-worker used “Hi”. Now when combined in one email, it was fine, but when I was sending the email out on it’s own, Outlook 2007 recognized the word “Hello” as being too formal and perhaps that I didn’t actually know the person I was sending it to. Lesson to be learned… don’t forget to test your campaigns out in all email clients to make sure that the email you spent all your hard work on doesn’t go unseen. Check out these websites for more “spammy” words that get caught in the filters.
http://www.returnpath.net/blog/2006/01/can-i-get-a-list-of-spam-words.php
