Tr.icking Spa.m Fil.ters

I receive emails all the time, where a bunch of the words have periods in them to “trick” spam filters into thinking it’s legit. I’ve also noticed most of these come from traffic exchange owners. I don’t think it’s a good idea for two reasons: 1) It’s annoying to read 2) Many spam filters know the period trick, and will end up weighing it as spam more because it’s trying to be tricked.

The biggest punishment for spam in many filters is the HTML to text ratio. It would be much better to focus on using HTML sparingly than inserting periods into “high risk” keywords. It would also do even more to use a reputable email provider, because they are most likely white listed in the first place.

For an example, I use Aweber. They probably send out millions of emails per month. My dedicated server probably sends out a hundred thousand per year. If you are Gmail, and you get an email that looks spammy from my server, you’d probably watch it closer. But if you get an email that looks spammy from Aweber, and you get tons of them all the time that are legit, it’ll probably pass. Sort of a safety in numbers kind of thing.