Overview of Spam Filters
and Digital Stationery®

1. Purpose of Spam Filters: The purpose of a spam filter is to block high volume advertisement emails (messages sent to hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people), not personal and professional messages. If a spam filter blocks a personal message, it is - by definition - a failure of the filter. The industry calls this a "false positive"

2. Spam Filter Quality and Settings: There are many spam filters on the market and as with any product category, some are great, some are OK, and some are terrible. Even good filters can catch more messages than they should if they are set too high. The combination of bad filters and extreme filter settings can produce a lot of false positives.

3. Spam Triggers: Filters examine both the structure and the content of incoming messages. We advise our clients to avoid using words and phrases that are often found in spam messages, such as "easy money", "special offer", "FREE", "$$$", BOLD ALL CAPS and colored text. Although individually these should not cause a problem, if there are many of them scattered throughout a message it may look like a poorly written advertisement and trigger rejection.

4. Digital Stationery®: Digital Stationery templates have been tested through several industry tools that evaluate the "spaminess" of a message and they typically come back with a rating of "0" indicating that they have almost no chance of being filtered out by good filters based on the composition and design of the template.

5. Recipient Responsibility: Since spam filters are not perfect, some bona fide messages may get held up and some undesirable messages still get through. In view of this, most email users now understand that they must check their spam or "junk" folders regularly. Even with good filters and good settings, some "good" messages, whether in plain text or HTML, will occasionally get caught. When this happens once, competent PC users will add the sender to a "Safe Senders" list so that it will never happen again.

BOTTOM LINE: Digital Stationery® provides its users with significant marketing advantages (professional image, additional web traffic, building social networks) while *slightly* increasing the chances of being caught by poorly designed or poorly set up spam filters. This is a minor inconvenience for most of our customers who see the advantages as significantly outweighing this occasional disadvantage.