You may have heard of spam filters and considered purchasing one to help reduce the overwhelming amount of junk mail in your inbox. If you purchase software, you should be able to customize the settings so that you will not miss any important email. But still be warned, some spam will leak through and you will likely filter out the occasional legitimate email. As long as the program you elect to use allows you to check the filtered out mail, you should be fine.

However, did you know that many Internet Service Providers (ISPs), including AOL, are installing their own spam filters? This could mean you are missing out on important email or your important messages are not reaching their intended recipients. Some email is filtered out if it contains certain "spammy" words (for information on these words and other helpful advice, read Jason Potash's article online at http://www.internetbasedmoms.com/ezine_killer.htm) If you publish an opt-in newsletter, you could be filtered out just for the fact that you are sending "bulk mail".

Here's the problem with many of the filters installed by ISPs:

1. You may never have the option to see the email that has been filtered out.
2. You may not be able to adjust any of the settings of the filters.
3. As a recipient of email, you could miss your ezine subscriptions and important business email.
4. As a sender, your ezine or newsletter may not reach all your subscribers and you may never know. Many of these ISP installed filters do not bounce the mail back to you. It just looks as though the email went through without problem. If it does bounce back to you, it might just be an auto-message from the ISP with no email address provided.

It seems rather strange to me that an Internet Service Provider should decide what content it's paying customers can receive in their email. Spam Filter Technology is not infallible and for any company to attempt to manage another person's email inbox based on approximations is ludicrous. Personally, I would prefer to delete 10 unsolicited emails than miss 1 important message.

What you can do about it:

1. Find out if your ISP has installed spam filters. If you cannot change the settings or view the filtered out email, you may want to consider switching providers.

2. If you publish a newsletter, you can send your newsletter by email with a link to your newsletter online. This may or may not work. Although, you probably won't be filtered out due the content of your email, you may be filtered out due to the fact you are sending "bulk mail".

In addition, you may find that many people are not willing to click on a link to get to your newsletter. You would have to carefully check your web page statistics to see the percentage of subscribers that are actually clicking through.

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Alice Seba thrives on helping others build profitable online businesses. Claim your Internet Marketing prescriptions to success at http://www.aliceseba.com