I was over at Arts Marketing blog last week catching up on Chad Bauman’s posts. One of his January posts contained some rules for administering bulk email lists. I looked over what he suggested and felt proud of myself for coming to many of those some conclusions on my own.

The next day I went in to work and reviewed the report for an email I had sent to my Listserv list the evening before. There was a long list of email address with the error message “Excessive Spam Content Detected” I had blatantly broken the rule about not using keywords common to spam in the subject line.

Now in my defense, I always do a test email to my work and two personal email address and the email passed those spam filters. It also passed through Yahoo and Hotmail filters so following Chad’s tip about using them as tests wouldn’t have helped. My email didn’t meet with the approval of the local Time Warner RoadRunner filter and that represents a pretty large chunk of folks.

What were the offending words you ask? One of the groups of musicians we are presenting boasted in an interview that they aimed to make people lose 20 lbs. by the end of the night through dancing. Thinking this was a good hook, my email subject line blared “Lose Weight with Band X at MyTheatre.”

In the message body I explained the boast, talked about the group a little and gave the ticket information which is probably why it got through most other filters. The timing was a little humbling given that I had been so smug about having already divined the guidelines.

Knowing the guidelines and following them are two different thing though, eh? Just goes to prove you should always approach what appears to be information with which you are overly familiar with an open mind.