Keeping Your Resume Out Of Spam Filters

The vast majority of e-mail received today is SPAM - bulk messages that are unsolicited and quickly clog up servers and inboxes all across the internet. This is why so many businesses and individuals use aggressive SPAM filters in an attempt to separate legitimate e-mail from nuisance e-mail.

Unfortunately, many job seekers end up with their resume e-mails being flagged as junk or SPAM, making delivery to the right person unreliable at best. The worst part is that you will very seldom receive any kind of a response that tells you when a message is filtered out - it just gets deleted immediately or moved into a junk folder for deletion in a few days.

There are some things you can do, though, to reduce the chances of your messages being misidentified as junk and make sure they get through to the people you really want to reach with your resume.

Follow directions

When you submit your resume to a potential employer in response to a job posting, follow that employer's submission directions EXACTLY. No variations, no slight changes, do exactly as they request.

Why? Because most employers provide specific directions so that resume submission are not filtered out as SPAM. For example, if the instructions say to put the job posting number in the subject line of your e-mail it is likely because they have set their filtering software to handle such messages in a specific manner. If you do not include the proper information, you risk having your message not being delivered as intended.

Check your e-mail provider

The ISP you use as an e-mail provider could be the cause of your messages not getting through. This is because most reputable e-mail networks subscribe to one of several SPAM-fighting services that keep "blacklists" of ISPs that are known sources of SPAM. If your message comes from a blacklist ISP then it will be blocked without ever even reaching your intended recipient.

You can check to see if your ISP is on a blacklist by looking it up on an anti-SPAM site such as spamcop.net. In most cases, an ISP on the blacklist will work very hard to get off of it so they will seldom stay on it for more than a few days. If, though, your ISP remains on the blacklist for any longer than that you should switch to another ISP for your e- mail services.

Other problem areas

A number of other message characteristics can trigger SPAM filters, so the best way to avoid this is to avoid sending messages with these elements. The most common things that are noted by SPAM filters are:

• A message sent to several e-mail addresses at the same time
• A blank subject field
• A subject field with exclamation points, dollar signs, numbers, all-capitalized words, or suspicious words like "free", "exclusive offer", "important opportunity", etc.
• A message with attachments
• A message composed in HTML instead of plain text

In most cases, it takes more than one of these characteristics for your message to be flagged as SPAM, but it is a good idea to avoid all of them whenever possible. If you think your message has not gone through, you can contact the recipient directly to ensure it arrived and/or follow up with a hard copy of your resume sent via regular mail.

 

 

 

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