Overview
Spam is a real issue and should be taken seriously by everyone sending emails. Your recipients can report emails as spam in their email program. Emails marked as spam by recipients reflect on your account. Additionally, spam filters use algorithms to detect and prevent spam automatically. In this article, learn more about spam so you can work to prevent it.
IN THIS ARTICLE
Definition of Spam
Spam is any email sent to a recipient who hasn’t given you direct and explicit permission to contact them on the topic of the email you are sending.
If you haven't read the CAN-SPAM Act, take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with its rules and regulations before starting your next email campaign.
Types of Spam
There are two kinds of spam that you need to know the difference between:
Marked Spam: When a recipient marks an email as spam and asks for it to be removed from their inbox.
Automatic Spam: When an email is identified as spam by an email server spam filter and is moved directly to junk/spam folder.
Spam Filters
Depending on the email server and its spam filters, legitimate emails can be delivered to a junk/spam box by accident. Accidental deliveries like this happen because an email trips a spam filter, other recipients have marked similar emails as spam, or because your message is often deleted without reading.
The difficulty is that how different spam filters work is kept hidden. This is beneficial because it keeps problematic spammers at bay. The challenge is that it makes it difficult to tell when your emails could automatically be flagged as spam. To prevent automatic spam, a good place to start is to follow best practices for sending emails and tips for content to avoid spam.
A note on Spam and Opens
A tiny image is included in every email to help track when an email is opened. So, an email is counted as 'opened' when the recipient chooses to view images in the email. Most recipients that think something is spam will not view images in an email. As such, a recipient could report that the email was spam without viewing images in the email - which could create this scenario above - reporting spam without opening it.
Spam Thresholds
A threshold is a percentage based on the number of spams against your account out of the total number of emails sent. The industry standard across many email marketing platforms is 1/1000 or 0.1%. So, if one out of every one thousand recipients marks an email as spam, sending email from your AMS+ account could be impacted. So, if you send less than 1,000 emails, you can only have one person mark the message as spam. Learn more about how AMS+ handles thresholds in our article on Thresholds & Disabling.