Develop Responsible E-mail Campaigns

We all know the Internet is drowning in spam. No doubt your own inbox overflows with pitches for herbal Viagra, septic tank cleansers and Nigerian bank scams. The Can Spam bill estimated 50 percent of all e-mail sent today is spam. Last June, Microsoft put the figure at 80 percent.

To combat this flood, ISPs and consumers have installed filters to identify and discard spam. These software programs use various techniques to tag it, including: black lists of IP addresses of known spammers, keyword lists of spam terms, collaborative filtering and more. While intended to stop spam, these filters also routinely toss requested commercial e-mail. How frequently? It’s hard to tell. Of six major catalogers interviewed for this article, all admitted they were unable to determine the fraction of their campaigns lost to the filters, and none were willing to speak on the record.