Yesterday at work someone was asking about how to help their customer avoid e-mail spam filters. This is important because we run a lot of legitimate e-mail campaigns for companies who actually allow their customers to opt in to such things. (In case you think I work for the devils that spam your inbox with endowment enhancement ads, I don’t. But I do still worship Loki, and he thinks those ads are funny. Conundrum, really).

Anyway…this morning someone was tweeting about their query getting blocked by agent spam filters because it had certain keywords in it. So buckle in for a short lecture that I may have more information on than a lot of people.

Different spam filters work different ways. Some allow you to only receive e-mail from people you’ve pre-approved. Two things on this:

1. Don’t enable this kind of filter if you’re querying. You’ll piss agents off.
2. If the agent you’re querying has one of these, this advice won’t help you. I’ve queried ezines that operate in such a way, and it’s aggrivating.

There’s another type of filter, though. It’s more of a grading or a rating system. Like golf, the higher the score your message gets, the worse off you are. A lot of these filters are adaptive, so it’s not possible for me to say specifically what they will and won’t look for, but I can give some hints. A pre-determined grade is assigned to a series of phrases, words, and domains. The more of those components a message contains, the more likely it is to be blocked.

Some things (but only a short list) that make it more likely to get your e-mail flagged:

• All Caps, especially in the subject header
• Blind cc-ing large numbers of people
• Words and phrases that relate to male enhancement, sexual performance, or pornography
• Promising the deal of a lifetime
• Your odds are also increased if you’re doing any of these and sending from free e-mail addresses (yahoo, hotmail, etc).
• Attachments

Just because you have some of these components doesn’t mean you’ll be filtered or blocked, but next time you go to query an agent just keep in mind in the back of your head: does my letter read like any spam I’ve seen recently? Does it contain any of those words or phrases or promise money from a foreign prince if they just give me their bank account number?

I know, just one more thing to keep in mind when you’re querying, but this one is easier. It’s pretty low stress compared to most of the things you need to know, so if you’re message doesn’t get filtered, you’ve scored big with little effort ^_^

What’s your least favorite part of the querying process?