Saturday 10 March 2012

Fun with Spam




Margaret has been creating a number of details (including the three above) from the Byzantium series of paintings that will be on show in London and then passed these on to Julian so he has photographs available should there be any responses to the Press Releases that are going out next week.

One thing to slightly delay things is that the company handling our mail-outs ran the texts of both the press release and the general bulletin through a Spam Checker (to make certain that our emails weren't directed into recipient's spam boxes), and they managed to achieve a score of 8.6. Anything over 5.0 is considered by the programme to be potential spam and thus likely to be promptly deflected from any Inbox worth its salt. This was all news to me; but apparently it's  based on identifying certain spam-sensitive words - so that the words 'exhibition' and 'painting', for example, score highly on the 'highly dubious' scale and thus help condemn any emails containing them to the spam box. 'Film' appears to be a dangerous word, whereas 'movie' is OK. Odd!

So time was taken by our friendly mail-out agency to re-write the releases in a spam-friendly way. It's actually quite hard to send out notice of an exhibition of paintings when both of the key words are among the main culprits. But they did it, with a final score of only 3.0!


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