I received a phone call the other day from a client of ours. She was wondering where the quote was that she had asked for three days previously. I was wondering what she was talking about. Apparently my spam filter had filtered her email into the trash.

I tracked down the missing email and promised to get back to her as soon as possible, but I could tell that she didn't feel that it was very professional of me to have missed her email.

It turns out that my client is not alone; as many as 1 in 4 emails sent to customers, suppliers, co-workers and friends may never arrive at their destination.

Fred Langa is with Information Week, 'Many, many people are experiencing lost email, good emails being thrown out as spam.'

Langa sent a test email to each of 10,000 volunteers he had recruited to work out how bad the problem really is.

All the volunteers had to do was respond, 'Only 60% of those mails actually made it all the way through the filtering process. So, you can look at that as a 40% failure rate, which is a huge problem.'

Most of us get dozens or more spam emails for every real email that arrives in our inbox, so a filter seems like a good way to save time and curb the flow of porn and unwanted advertisements. But can we afford to miss out on genuine emails?

According to a study from San Francisco-based Ferris Research Inc, blocked legitimate email, or false positives costed U.S businesses approximately $3.5 billion in 2003.

A missed email nearly cost me the business of an existing client, so I had to ask myself how many new clients was I missing due to my spam filter, and what was it doing to the reputation of my business?

So why was a legitimate email being trashed by my spam filter?

As spammers get more and more clever at making their emails look legitimate, spam filters get tougher and tougher on what they consider to be spam. Modern filters don't just look at the words in an email, they look at the way an email is put together and what sort of formatting it contains.

Very simple and ordinary things can get an email classified as spam - background colours and images, embedded images, a link to a website, the words 'free' or 'click here' or 'application' or 'invoice', coloured text, a fancy signature etc. Some filters won't accept email from free email accounts such as yahoo.com or hotmail.com. Many filters won't accept email that contains 'webbugs' - these are little image links designed to let you know if the recipient opened your email.

Many free email accounts include self advertising as part of every email a user sends. This little ad and link is also likely to be considered spam.

My customers are mostly businesses so they tend to keep their emails plain and simple, but more and more of them are including professional looking headers and signatures in their emails, designed to reflect their letterhead or business cards.

In the accommodation business, most customers are private individuals who often have very fancy emails with complicated stationery and signatures - just the sort of thing that will fall victim to a spam filter.

Some filters are based on 'whitelists'. These are lists of email addressed that are ‘OK’d’ by you in advance. This sort of filter works fine for a private email account where you know in advance who should be allowed to contact you. But it is not much use to a business which depends on contacts from new customers who aren't yet on the 'whitelist'.

But I don't want to have all that spam ... so what can I do?

1. Get all your filtering under your control. Make sure you know which spam filtering programs are operating on your email account and how to configure them. Find out what filters the program uses and how they are working to filter spam. If you don't understand how your spam filter is working, get a different program. It is best to stick to one filtering program as the interaction between several may result in unexpected false positives.

2. Some ISP's place filters on their mail servers. Check with your ISP and make sure they are not making decisions for you about what you don't want to see. If they can't give you control over the filters on your mail account, then find another ISP who doesn't filter or can give you control over the filters.

3. Customise your filters. Most spam filters come with default settings. Don't just accept them as is. Many spam filters are designed for personal use and filter spam much more aggressively than is suitable for business use. A business can't afford to miss an email, but if your sister doesn't get a response to an email to you, she will call to find out why.

4. Make sure your spam filter doesn't delete the spam, instead have it moved into a 'spam' folder, then you can scan the folder several times a day to check that you haven't missed an important email. This is really important and you need to make sure everyone working in your business regularly scans their spam folder. Regularly is at least twice a day. When someone sends an email they expect a prompt response, so discovering a lost email in your spam folder a week after it arrived is about the same as not finding it at all.

5. Use lots of specific rules rather than a few broad rules. Filtering out emails containing 'www.specialdeals4u.com' is much less likely to result in a false positive than filtering out all emails with the words 'free offer'. You will wind up with more filters but less missed mail.

6. Use positive filters to put email you know is legitimate in a separate mail box - you can do this by filtering on specific subjects or email addresses that you know are not spam. That way you only need to sort out what is left in your inbox.

7. Separate your business from your personal account. If your family and kids use your email account, you will want to put tough filters in place to screen out porn and other offensive material. To prevent business emails from falling victim to these filters, get a separate email account for your business mail.

8. Accept that you will have to put up with scanning a certain amount of spam. Spending a couple of minutes every time you check your mail trashing the spam is a small price to pay for the peace of mind of knowing that you aren't missing out on important business.

Finally, don't forget that your emails can just as easily wind up in someone else's spam box. If you don't get an expected response to an email, don't just assume the recipient is rudely ignoring you, pick up the phone and give them a call, they may not have known you were trying to contact them at all.

Resources

'Filter-proofing the email you send' http://www.takeabreak.com.au/filterproof.htm. A companion article to this one which contains suggestions for improving the chances of your emails making it through the recipients' spam filters.

Consumer Search report and review summary on a range of Spam Filters http://www.consumersearch.com/www/computers/spam_filters/fullstory.html. The article includes links to their recommended products (2 of which are free software) and also the full reviews so you can see what was tested and how. In addition the discussion of the pros and cons of the different types of filters is essential reading if you are shopping for a spam filter.

Spam Filter Review 2004 is a website which reviews and compares the available spam filters and keeps a 'top ten' list of recommendations. http://www.spamfilterreview.com This site is a great resource and has a link on the home page to a good definition of what makes a good spam filter. When checking out their reviews you need to keep in mind that your end use is a business one, not a personal one. It also doesn't appear to review any of the free products.

About the Author
Michelle Davis is Director of Websites at Work a web design business that specialises in designing and supporting database driven websites set up for easy owner content management. She may be contacted via e-mail at michelle@websitesatwork.com.au , or via their web site: www.websitesatwork.com.au

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