Email Filtering Systems

Email filtering systems, such as Barracuda and Mimecast, can affect overall scores in the reporting section of Send drastically. These systems are designed to protect email software, such as a company's email system, from being corrupted by picking up certain email campaigns as spam. While this is usually an essential, helpful tool there can be rare cases when the filtering does not act as normal and can be a hindrance when you start analysing your campaigns. This article will give advice on how to detect email filtering systems and also offer different solutions on how to approach the situation before and after it has taken place.

 
What is email filtering?
 
An email filtering system blocks access to objectionable content and unauthorized internet applications (Spam). It does this by filtering content which it deems a threat to your computers security.
 
How do I detect it?
 
There are several ways for a spam filter to be identified. One of the most common ways to detect a spam filter is by looking at your reporting and seeing a contact with an abnormally high score, and check to see whether the number of total clicks and number of total views are identical. If they are, this is a sign that an email filtering system has been activated and the email campaign has been registered as spam, and therefore is the reason that the score in reporting is massively affected.

The high number of clicks are usually for 'recipient web version from plain text', but it can also affect regular web versions of campaigns. The email filtering system interacts with the campaign by clicking on the link repetitively. 

What do I need to do?
 
One procedure that can help to minimalize the chance of email filtering systems affecting your campaigns is to always check for content that could be picked up as spam. For example, financial content has proved to be a trigger in many cases so when creating a campaign it is always important to keep this in mind. Alternatively, you can ask the contacts receiving your campaign to add you to their allow list, or to contact the company designing these systems.
 
How do I filter out those recipients in custom reports?
 
Unfortunately there is no easy way to filter this data unless a cap is put on the score in the reporting section. The best course of action is to ask contacts to add you to their allow list, which has proved successful in many cases, or to simply contact the email systems the company supports.