I was just poking through my gmail spam folder and noticed that a few of my newsletters had dropped through. That’s not altogether surprising, but I did notice that Vonage was getting in there more often than it made it to my inbox.
A quick look through the content of one of them revealed a few things:
- Large, colorful fonts – we’re talking orange here
- Large footers – that’s a lot of small point font
- at least 7 exclamation points!! (at least there weren’t two at a time)
- A bit image heavy
While none of these are dead spam give aways, they all would add to the score. All in all, still not enough for me to say it was overly spammy. One of the other messages was very tame, with lots of text, no crazy formatting, and almost no !’s. Guilty by association? Maybe, these things are kind of a crap-shoot. I would guess the answer is yes, since my monthly bill got spam foldered too, and that was just plain text.
It just goes to show that we have a long way to go. It’s really hard to be sure that you aren’t missing stuff in your spam folder, and it’s hard for companies to send you interesting emails without getting marked as spam. oh email, why are you so fickle?
BTW, eBags, ProFlowers, and Home Depot each had an email in the spam folder as well.
Update: I just ran across this page exposing some evil behind Vonage’s Refer a Friend program. Apparently google was smarter than I thought!