How to get commercial e-mail through
I got an interesting e-mail today. Maybe I misread it, maybe not. You be the judge. I won’t embarass the guy by printing his e-mail address, but here’s his message and my reply:
Hello Out there,
Sorry If Im knocking on the wrong door. But my problem is a bit crucial
for me. I have been trying to send a business letter to one of our service
providers. Everytime I send the mail its getting spammed. I have tried
with all my official and personal accounts. (includes inbox, yahoo,
gmail). I have also tried changing my subject. But everytime it ended
being bounced back. Now I severely need a help on sending my mail over to
the reciepient.
foillowing are the error recieved.
SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
host xxx.xxxxx.xxx [xxx.xx.xxx.x]: 550 5.7.1 Blocked by SpamAssassinIm sorry to tell that I can tell you more on this ..
Please, can any one give a light on this.
And my response:
Hi there,
It’s very simple. Your message looks like spam, and is being filtered
thus. If you have a personal mail to your service provider, I suggest you
call them and complain. If your message is commercial and unsolicited,
you’re screwed. They outthought you. If you really need to get your
message through, do it the oldfashioned way: Snail mail.
At the Spam Symposium today, somebody asked me, how does one become a spammer. There probably are some innocent spammers out there. People who don’t realize that what they’re doing will have other people shouting “Spammer, get thee behind me”!
Update:
I got my e-mail in return. Turns out the return address was funny. I thought the question was a bit funny. I mean, who’d ask an anti-spammer how to get past e-mail filters? I didn’t look at the to address. Turns out he asked that question on a blogspam discussion list that was dead by now…