Spam is a problem that faces most people with email addresses today. It is an even bigger problem for the internet business community that is genuinely trying to distinguish itself from being called spammers. The problem lies in the simplicity of the medium and the temptation to reach the widest audience in as little time and cost as possible. Most spammers use some dubious means to acquire email addresses to mail to and this is the root of the problem. No customer is asked whether he or she wants to receive a mail before a mail is sent. This may sound harmless since there is always a delete button; however, the problem is that the number of mails that some individuals can get in the space of a day is enough to clog someone's inbox and the cost of bandwidth to ISPs and corporations is intolerable. It is for this reason that spam filters were created. These are software that have been created to identify spam mail and over the years they have evolved to using complicated mathematics to find patterns in suspect mails and then move them into a spam folder.

But the big question is, how do you know if the mailer that you are creating is spam or not? This judgment will be made in any case by a spam filter somewhere so it makes sense to use the benchmarks of spam filters. Spam is categorized by these filters using a mathematical function called probability. What it comes down to is how many times you use a phrase of hard sell and sales spiel and also how many times you use a spamming word. Some words, if repeated more than a few times will be picked up. These words include the name of the product, the brand name of the product, price, offers, discounts, etc.

Are you trying to mask your sales spiel by using special characters? This is a common trick that was used by many marketers selling Viagra. This is a useless technique and most filters can recognize these combinations.

The most fundamental way to know if you are sending spam is if you are sending an unsolicited mail. Always get a user's opt-in before you send mails.

Are you targeting the right people? Spammers are quite undiscerning and will mail everybody who has an email address.

The final way to know if you are sending spam is whether that was your objective in the first place. Spam filters will weed out spam mail and any mail that contains sales spiel but the distinction of whether you are a spammer or not lies in your own corporate objectives. This self awareness is going to be crucial in the years to come because of the dwindling amount of spam traffic. The tides started changing at the start of this year and with the increasing intelligence of filters, hopefully, spam will end up being a thing of the past.