Whether you're operating your own email lists or renting others', one of the things you hate to think is that your emails are not getting through to the recipients. Unfortunately, I have reason to think that a fair amount of commercial email is not reaching its intended recipients because of blocks and filters and that these obstacles will only increase in the future.

One of the most interesting spam-blocking efforts underway today is SpamNet, an application created by a company called Cloudmark (http://www.cloudmark.com). Cloudmark is founded by Jordan Ritter, one of the co-founders of Napster. This is significant, because SpamNet uses Napster-like peer-to-peer networking to create a spam-filtering community. I've been testing SpamNet now for about five weeks, and I think there's a good possibility that this application will have a significant impact on individual users' ability to fight spam, and on the ability (or inability) of marketers and publishers to reach their email subscribers.

Each SpamNet user has a simple toolbar added to his or her Outlook interface (the program only works with Microsoft Outlook for now), with buttons marked "Block" and "Unblock." When a user blocks an email message, that message moves to a Spam folder. However, that blocking action also sends out a "vote" to the larger SpamNet community. Depending on that user's "reputation" in the network and depending on how many other users have blocked email from that same source, emails from that source will be moved automatically to the Spam folders of all users in the network.

In other words, with SpamNet, it's now possible for users to participate in a "group" approach to spam filtering. As of today, my SpamNet statistics tell me that the program has checked 3,653 emails in the past five weeks and has caught 793 spams. Over that time, SpamNet has continued to get better at filtering spam and is now catching about 86% of the spam coming to my inbox.

All of These Non-Spam Emails Got Blocked

However, my big concern is the number of "false positives," that is, non-spam messages that are being caught in the spam net. I count 50 of these just in the past week. Granted, SpamNet has a "white list" function that allows you to permanently unblock messages from any address. But this function is hard to find and hard to use, and most users are unlikely to employ it -- which means that a lot of opt-in email is going to get shuffled silently out of inboxes and into Spam folders.

Just to give you an idea what we're talking about, here is a sampling of the non-spam email that SpamNet has filtered out on my behalf recently:

·        Half.com DVD specials

·        CNN Breaking News

·        Staples.com specials

·        Daily Quote from Quote.com

·        Topica TopOffers

·        Yesmail/ValuPage mailing

·        The Motley Fool's Foolwatch

·        Daily Dilbert (Anybody know Scott Adams? He might like to know that Dilbert has been spamming -- or maybe it's one of Dogbert's schemes.)

·        eMarketer Daily

·        Musician's Friend Newsletter

·        United Airlines special fares

·        Wall Street Journal new features announcement

·        Venture Reporter (Yes, Jason, it's true!)

·        Buy.com specials

·        Hot Deals from Hotel Reservations Network

·        iVillage special offer

·        Southwest Airlines airfare specials

·        PC World Hot Shareware Newsletter

·        Bill Gates's "Trustworthy Computing" emailing (No surprise here, but Microsoft does have permission to send me email.)

·        Classmates.com Connections

·        Handspring e-newsletter

·        Earthlink Weekly Email Newsletter

·        The Bull Market Weekly Advisor

·        McAfee.com: "Learn how to stop unwanted spam emails" (Ironic, huh?)

·        MapQuest news

·        PlaceWare RealTimes Newsletter

·        mp3.com newsletter

·        Amazon.com Delivers

·        Constant Contact newsletter

·        About.com special offer

·        InfoBeat News

·        BestFares.com Hot Deals

·        Microsoft bCentral Bulletin

Quite a lineup isn't it? Think those companies would be surprised that a fast-growing anti-spam network is automatically filtering out their messages?

Now we could argue until the end of the year whether or not these emails should or shouldn't be classified as spam. But whether these various commercial messages and newsletters are technically unsolicited or opt-in doesn't really matter. The fact is that this spam-filtering community is defining them as spam and blocking them. For an email publisher to get labeled as a spammer, all it takes is for enough SpamNet users to say, "I feel that this is spam," and to click their "Block" buttons.

When defining spam, I prefer the "practical purposes" definition: If the recipient views your email as spam, then for all practical purposes it is spam. If recipients think you're spamming them, then you are more likely to get in trouble and your email is less likely to get opened. In the case of SpamNet, the "practical purposes" definition rules. So far, the SpamNet user base is small, only about 32,000, but that's up from about 5,000, as I recall, only five weeks ago. If this community can achieve exponential growth, it could become a real force. And this is a P2P application that is not likely to be squashed by the Recording Industry Association.

So what can you do to avoid getting caught in the SpamNet? And in general, how can you avoid being labeled as a spammer -- and getting blocked, filtering, trashed, or simply ignored? Here are some questions to ask yourself:

·        What are my email list signup procedures? When people start receiving my emails, will they think, "Oh, here it is!" or "Where the hell did this come from?"

·        What does your "From" field say, and what's the return address for your email? When your email arrives, will the recipient recognize who it's from?

·        Does your Subject line sound like spam or like valuable information from a trusted provider?

·        Are you sending the content that your recipients are expecting, or will they feel that you have violated their trust by sending material that abuses the relationship?

·        Are you mailing so often that your recipients are going to say, "I'm sick of this -- I want out!"

How about you? What have you been doing to try to make sure that your email communications get through? Send us your response by clicking on the "Post Letter" link in the upper-right column of this page.

Al Bredenberg is publisher of EmailResults.com (http://www.emailresults.com) and the Marketers' Market (http://market.emailresults.com), the online marketplace for opt-in email lists and marketing services.