Strategies, techniques and best practice

Spam words to avoid

What if a write a perfectly legitimate message, and it is flagged as SPAM? It happens quite often and there are many reasons why this might happen. One of them is that the content of the message may have triggered an antispam filter. Specifically, you may be using words that work as red flags in many popular anti-spam systems.

This page can help! Here is a list of words that many antispam filters use to locate potentially spammy messages. The list is certainly not exhaustive, but it’s a good starting point.

Avoid using these “spam words” (especially in the subject of your messages) and you can reduce the risk of having a legitimate message being blocked or delivered to the SPAM folder.

Next to each word is a numeric value: spam filters use it to calculate a total number that is used to determine whether your message might be SPAM. In fact, a single spam word by itself will rarely cause an issue: it’s the sum of all of those words that can create a problem, as discussed in How to Create a Good HTML Email (it’s a typical case of the straw breaks the camel).