I had a somewhat funny experience today discovering how computers figure out what is spam and what is not.

It started when I got an email from a new customer on my tutoring site (this is a passive income business I’ve been working on).

Brian,

This got marked as Spam, just so you know. I just happened to catch it while browsing for a FR33 D0NG-B00ST WITH M3XICAN V1AGRA!!!
Don’t know why this got blocked when none of the student contacts did, but you might wanna check it out. Meanwhile I’ll subscribe; I been clockin mad cheddar from this shit. Too bad any students who’ve wanted to catch me the past week would have missed me… but I was ready for a break anyway. Thanks for helping me make my car payments (just bought a Passat)!

[name removed]

After contemplating whether or not to add his quote “I been clockin mad cheddar from this shit” to my testimonial page, I decided to investigate why my email might be getting marked as spam.

After all, this was a pretty important email. It was the email where I ask tutors (with a free account) to subscribe and pay me money after their free trial has ended. It’s the moment of truth where I find out if people really think my service is worth paying for. This needed to be fixed ASAP!

Here is what the email looked like that was getting marked as spam (with html links and image removed):

Hi [first name],

We hope you’ve enjoyed using UniversityTutor.com. Five students have now contacted you (which is the max for a free account) and hopefully at least one of those has turned into a tutoring job for you!

Now would be a great time to subscribe if you’d like to continue getting matched with students and making money tutoring. Keep in mind that the real benefit comes over time as you build your experience and client ratings on the site. If you already have a couple students you’re working with, it might be time to raise your prices!

Here’s what you’re going to get…

* Unlimited contacts from students looking to hire you
* Unlimited client ratings and reviews so you can build your experience and raise your hourly rate
* As always, keep 100% of what you earn and set your own price
* Work WHEN and WHERE you want with flexible hours and locations
* Try it risk-free with our 60 day money back guarantee!

Subscriptions are month-to-month and it’s easy to cancel or pause your subscription at any time. There is no setup fee, no early termination fee, and no long term contracts.

With an ongoing stream of tutoring jobs, you can earn hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month, but a subscription to UniversityTutor.com is just $9.95/month for a limited time. It pays for itself with less than one hour of tutoring!

Best of all, you can try it absolutely risk-free. Here is our promise: if you are not completely satisfied, contact us any time within 60 days for a full, no-hassle refund.

Click here to subscribe and continue earning money tutoring. It takes just a few seconds:

If you have any feedback, questions, or concerns, feel free to reply to this email.

Thanks and talk to you soon!
UniversityTutor.com

To unsubscribe from UniversityTutor emails please click here.

One tool you can use to analyze the “spam score” of a message is called Spam Assassin. Luckily, my Aweber account had a tool built into it that allowed me to check the spam score with Spam Assassin. (If anyone knows a way to do this without Aweber please post a comment below).

Whoever wrote the tool had a sense of humor because this is the report it generated on my message.

Apparently it got a spam score of 4.9 out of 10, which isn’t terrible but it’s right on the border line of becoming spam. I had to laugh a little when it told me my message was being marked as spam because it didn’t believe my claim of “risk free – suuurrreee” and that “something was being emphatically guaranteed”.

After reading the report, all I had to do was make two small changes. Instead of saying:

Try it risk-free with our 60 day money back guarantee!

I changed it to:

If you aren’t 100% satisfied, contact us any time within 60 days for a full, no-hassle refund

And I removed the sentence which reads:

Best of all, you can try it absolutely risk-free.

Here is my NEW spam score:

I think I must have been reading too much internet marketing junk – because I realized that my original email did sound pretty over-hyped (and it still does probably). Smart people don’t get tricked by gimmicky stuff like that – they just want an honest service that won’t screw them.

So anyway, hopefully more of my potential customers will be getting this email now. If you don’t even ASK for the sale (because it’s in their spam folder) – you will never get it.

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

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