Reputation Is Everything ... We're Talking eMails Silly!

Conventional wisdom says that a good sender reputation beats content as the best way to boost your deliverability. It also holds that the "report spam" button found in so many e-mail clients is the chief reputation-tarnisher. While these ideas are true, content does still matter. What's different now: the "report spam" button also influences content filters. So when your subscriber clicks the "report spam" button, not only does it launch a spam complaint that counts against your reputation, it also tells content filters what to do with your email message. Where Reputation and Content Collide Here's how it works, using Cloudmark and Comcast as an example. Cloudmark is a content filter that individual users install as a plug-in into their e-mail clients. ISPs can also use it along with their other filtering techniques. Comcast is an ISP that works with Cloudmark this way. When a Cloudmark user or Comcast customer marks a message as spam, that information goes back to Cloudmark's software, which scans the e-mail looking for "fingerprints," or common spam indicators. As with the spam-complaint button, one report by itself generally won't doom your messages to permanent blocking. However, the individual's report gets aggregated with all other Cloudmark users. If enough of them mark your message as spam and the software finds enough common fingerprints, the content filter will adjust its rules. The result? Very soon your messages no longer get delivered because of both content and reputation. That's why the real content problem doesn't boil down to whether you use "free" in all capitals and 18-point bold red typeface and what a content filter thinks about it. The problem with tactics like this is what your readers decide that looks like and how they react.