Hi! Welcome to Snovio!
I am Kseniia and in this video we’ll take a close
and thorough look at spam filters and what you need to know to avoid them.
The word “spam” has become a familiar part of our daily vocabulary.
We may pay no attention to it,
but what we definitely do not want is our emails to fall under this classification
So what is spam?
Spam is unsolicited emails sent in bulk with the purpose to promote,
spread malware, or phish, to the people who didn’t give their consent to receive them.
Spam emails can be recognized by the following characteristics:
Unsolicited
Invisible headers
Poor grammar and spelling
Asking for suspicious actions or information
Sent in bulk
Anonymous sender
Spammy subject lines
Bright email body with lots of pictures, colors, and fonts
Multiple links
Irrelevant and suspicious attachments
I know what you’re thinking:
isn’t cold outreach all about sending attention-grabbing emails to recipients
that do not expect them and didn’t give consent to receive them?
Yes
So, are cold emails actually spam?
There’s much debate whether cold emailing can be classified as spam.
On one hand, cold emails can be considered undesirable messages.
On the other hand, cold emailing is pretty much the only one connector between vendors
and potential clients, networking aside.
And it’s especially important in the times like now when offline events
and face-to-face meetings are impossible.
So what is the difference between spam and cold emails?
#1 Targeting.
Cold emails, when done correctly, are highly personalized messages
with a specific offer sent to a limited circle of recipients
These recipients are potential customers
and partners that are likely to be interested in the offer.
Meanwhile, spam emails are messages sent in bulk
to a database scraped or bought without any research
that contains people that will have no interest in the offer at all.
#2 Volume.
Spam emails are sent in large volumes, usually to thousands of people at a time,
while cold emails are aimed to the particular audience
which is usually limited in size.
However, it’s worth noting the importance of warming up your account
when it comes to sending a large number of genuine cold emails:
if you do send 1000 legitimate cold emails and follow-ups a day,
it’s important to make sure your email accounts are warmed-up.
Sending such volumes from newly created accounts is likely to trigger spam filters.
#3 Content.
Cold emails are highly personalized
while spam emails usually contain a one-fits-all generic offer.
When you read such emails, you may notice how impersonal they are,
as if the person sending them knows absolutely nothing about you.
So what are spam filters?
The name speaks for itself -
their purpose is to detect unsolicited and virus-carrying emails
and stop them from getting into users’ inboxes.
There are three basic spam filter types:
1. ISP (or Internet Service Provider) Email Spam Filters
Used by ISP service providers.
At this level the emails are filtered before they can even reach you.
2. Email Service Provider Spam Filters
Used by email service providers like Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and others.
3. Software or Cloud-based Spam Filters
Can be used by organizations or individual users.
Spam filters are divided into two types - inbound and outbound.
Outbound filters are designed to check the emails sent from the network.
Inbound filters examine the emails sent to the network.
Inbound filters are the first line of defense that welcomes your email
and defines its further fate -
whether it`ll get to the recipient's Inbox, Spam box or will be rejected altogether.
Spam filters use heuristic methods, which means each email undergoes
a checkup by a set of predefined algorithms.
After each step of the checkup
the email message gets a numerical spam probability score
and if the score exceeds a particular threshold
the email gets flagged as spam and blocked from going further.
Spam filters can be focused on certain criteria:
Content filters scan the content of email messages:
the language, images, attachments, format of the message
and whether there are any words that are commonly used in spam,
aka spam trigger words.
Header filters check the email header to look for suspicious elements
such as known spammer email addresses.
Blacklist filters.
Blacklists are one of the most popular anti-spam filtering measures.
Blacklists check the reputation of sender IP addresses
and help providers to reject emails coming from suspicious
or blacklisted IP addresses.
That’s why it’s important for legitimate senders to have a dedicated IP address
- if anyone with the same IP address sends spam,
it could affect the deliverability for other users.
Code filters check the source code of the emails.
Misuse of tags and bad coding, especially the code copy pasted from Microsoft Word
can trigger spam filters.
Rules-based filters apply a set of customized rules
created by the company to exclude emails from specific senders,
or emails containing specific words in the subject line or body.
Many spam filters, especially spam filters of the email providers
like Gmail, Outlook, and others
take your recipient's engagement into consideration
when deciding whether your email will get flagged as spam
If your emails tend to be left unopened,
you will find that more and more of your emails will land in the spam folder.
Moreover,
spam filters always share the data about senders` activity with each other.
If your email gets flagged as spam by one of the spam filters,
there is no doubt this info will be shared to the rest
and from that moment your emails will be examined with more attention.
It’s quite possible that your emails may even be rejected without checking
simply because they`ve been marked as spam before by another filter.
Spam filters can be a great obstacle on the way to the recipients` Inbox,
but if you follow all the basic rules, you have nothing to worry about.
These filters
were created in order to protect our inboxes from unsolicited messages
and while yes, they will examine your emails with extra care,
it doesn't mean outreachers cannot be on good terms with them.
Check out our next videos on how to avoid spam filters
and not get flagged as spam for even more tips.
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See you!