Email marketing has genuinely come a long way for some internet entities like the major booksellers and music magnates. Most of these entities have made email marketing work for them in a truly unique way. However, for the smaller entities on the internet the distinction between being spammers and real businessmen is a blurred one. This distinction is not just one for the academicians and policymakers. It is a reality in the form of spam filters. They are software that has been created to protect users against some of the most nefarious spammers on the internet.

These filters are quite complex and spam filtering uses a combination of methods like intelligent algorithms, blacklists, and keyword searches to ensure that citizens of the internet do not have to worry about spam. The most difficult filtering mechanisms to beat are the Bayesian filtering method and the Markovian discrimination. Both of these methods learn from an email user's behavior to understand which message is spam and which is not. Bayesian filtering analyzes single words and computes a score for each mail message. If the score is more than 95 per cent, the message is tagged spam. Markovian discrimination goes a step further and captures entire phrases that could be spam like and accordingly marks a mail as spam.

Spam filters place a great deal of stress on the content team of any internet company but there are some ways of getting around the problem. The first is to get a customer's opt-in by sending a mail to the user's inbox for validation. This will elicit a reply and any mail in the user's sent folder will not be marked as spam. The next trick is to not use keywords like prize, money, Viagra, finance, etc. These are spam words and should be avoided. The third tactic is to use imagery as much as possible. Filters cannot decipher images. The last trick is to use genuine email addresses and aliases. Do not use the obviously fake names, addresses, or subject lines.

Of course, there is no absolute guarantee that you can send a mail to the client first and not get rejected by a filter. In this case, your prime audience would be people who have just started using their mailboxes. Therefore, a smart thing to do is to not try and hard sell your product as this will be caught by a spam filter. Instead, be informative, have a message to send, and even if the customer won't buy something from you, give him or her something to take away from the experience.

It is important that you follow these techniques as every mail marked as spam could cost your company. Additionally, you could just end up getting your domain marked as a spam domain. This will end up in the dreaded DNS blacklist and at this point you could have to invest in new domain names and infrastructure. The important thing is to be genuine.