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Need option about Spam Assassin report

by Barbara Eyre
3 replies
My boss has put together a simple HTML mailer for a client ... something we've done before many times.

This one consists of the site's banner, 4 lines of text, and 4 product images (all four in one row) ... the width is 800 pixels across.

None of the images have an "alt" tag. The 3 links do not have a "title" tag.

Yet, the following was the most grievous error we got and it put us over the 5.0 for spam ... (the rest of the errors don't make sense either, but they are minimal in rating). The mailer is done is very basic beginner HTML 101 ... no scripts, no redirects, no under-handed anything.

2.401 HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_20 HTML: images with 1600-2000 bytes of words

Is this error referring to the "alt" tags that aren't even there?
It can't be the image names ... product1.jpg, product2.jpg ... that is how they are literally named.

Any ideas?
#assassin #option #report #spam
  • Profile picture of the author Neil Morgan
    Hey Barbara

    As you probably know, spam filters look for certain words in an email to attempt to decide if that email is spam.

    One way spammers try to get around that is to design their email as an image (or multiple images) and include minimal text. Spam filters cannot read the words that are embedded in the images.

    So that's why your email is triggering the filter - because it's mostly images with little text - a very well-known way that spammers attempt to get around filtering. As you can see, you're getting quite heavily penalised - 2.4 points for that one problem - the standard "this is spam" threshold for SpamAssassin is 5.0 for the entire email and some ISPs are more strict than this because this is a value they can set.

    You need to change things around a bit so that the there is more real text and less image. At some point, you'll tip the balance and not trigger the filter.

    Cheers,

    Neil
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