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Email Editorials Does Your Email End up in the Spam (Junk) Box (Folder)? Sept 7, 2007: about a year ago I started using the "Junk" mail control in Thunderbird for my email. It is fast, easy and readily trained. That solved the majority of my spam problems at home. A couple of months ago at work we upgraded our Outlook mail at work and similarly that pretty much solved the spam problem. Here is the remaining problem - many people out there still send email that is indistinguishable from spam for any automatic filter. For example, what do you make of this: Hi Joe, we had a great part last night, please see the attached pictures. or this: Hi Joe, I need your help with this, please see the attachment. or this: Joe, a friend has sent you an ecard, click here to see it. or this: Joe, it was great meeting u last week. Giv me a call, k? I contend that all of these should end up in your spam folder. If you send email that looks like that, you don't deserve to have it delivered to your friends. The main problem remaining with the incredible time-waster known as spam is training people to write email so it doesn't look like spam. Of course, that is a lot easier said than done, especially since spam senders are continually learning what filters are rejecting finding ways to get around them. Avoiding writing email that looks like spam is going to be an moving target. However, here are some of examples of the current "state of the art": instead of using words like "Viagra" that are probably being filtered by everyone except the most tecnically incompetent by now - use mispellings that look the same like "V1agra", or "V i a g r a", or which may not look so much the same but give the idea easily enough, like "Viagera" or "Vaigra" or "Viegra". There are so many possibilities for this that nobody will have a complete list of them in their junk mail controls. instead of writing your ad into an email, make it a picture that shows up in the email - it will be a while until spam filters are smart enough to read a picture find some inticement to take the user to a website which contains the real ad By now it should be obvious why I say you don't deserve to have email such as the samples above delivered. Any email with: very little real text encouragement to click on links or open attachments a lot of typos ...should be regarded as suspect. Any email with all of the above should definitely be filtered out by an decent spam filter. So here is my radical suggestion if you want people to see what you send them - write real email, with real content and learn to use your spell checker.