Spam Deterrent

     Have you ever sent someone an email, and then discovered that they never received it?  When the recipient looks in their "junk mail" or "spam" folder several weeks later, they find it.  Why would it have landed there?

     With today's new protection against spam and junk mail, sometimes the technology goes too far and removes mail that it shouldn't due to the instruction provided in the programming.

     Some spam filters block any emails that come from a free email provider (like gmail, hotmail or yahoo), because anyone can create an address for free.  Some spam filters blok any email that ends with a .org because it might be from a non-profit organization that solicitis contributions.

     But there are other triggers that could send your email into a junk mail file rather than a recipient's inbox.  One is if the word "million" or "millions" is included in the text.  Filters read this as an offer for "millions of dollars," even though you might be sharing information about a dinosaur remains that are millions of years old.

     Another is if your email contains text that is the same color as the background of your email.  For instance, if one section of your email is white with black text, and another section has a colored background with white text, a spam filter could throw this into your junk folder.  This is to protect you from a potential virus code that could be a part of the page, since you wouldn't know it was there due to the text being the same color as the background.

© Michael V. Ziemski, Instrumediatech, 2008 (Original Publication Date: 20080114)

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