The Seven Things (And More)
You Can't Say In Email

By Susan E. Fisher

Comedian George Carlin's infamous routine, "Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV" rocked the 1970s and beyond. The biting bit offered a shock jock-style demonstration of how censorship, in the comedian's estimation, had gotten out of hand. Carlin's routine made its ultimate point by getting banned from the airwaves.

With the rise of the Internet, times had changed. Or, so free speech advocates thought. Now, the censors are at it again, suppressing anything considered objectionable. But, this time, the censors aren't even judges or government officials. They aren't even human, and they operate according to their own rules. They are spam filters.

With all the unsolicited and truly objectionable e-mail making the rounds these days, it makes good business sense for most companies to adopt an automated method to safeguard communications. Filters that flag inappropriate and unwanted material are valuable. Still, the same content filters that are supposed to be protecting corporate communications and increasing productivity may be blocking a good chunk of legitimate communications.

Do you get to say what you want to say? Do you get to read what you want to read?

In crafting newsletters, we carefully abide by spam filters' daunting demands and avoid terms we know filters will flag and cause messages to be rejected. Increasingly, these restrictions can seem ludicrous. Many of the terms we no longer use in our email are not even vaguely offensive.

What's most galling is we already have permission to share these words. We publish only the words our clients wish to express to business customers and partners who have granted permission to read these messages. Yet, the filters often act as mindless guards rather than intelligent gatekeepers.

For example, here are seven innocuous words (or phrases) you can't "say" in an email without risk of alerting the spam filter police.*

1. enlarge
2. win
3. long distance
4. free
5. big bucks
6. click here
7. spam

And, for good measure, here are a few others: billion dollars, breakthrough, bulk, call now and closeout.

*Thanks to our partner Exact Target of Indianapolis for recording these.

These restrictions have raised real problems for our customers, who struggle to find precise and acceptable language to communicate with their customers via email. If the implications for business weren't so negative, they would be downright silly. One writer, Fred Langa, notes that you want to be careful if you wish to address an associate named "Richard" in email by his nickname.

The "wrong" sort of punctuation can also get your business correspondence sent to the virtual pokey. Don't bother using multiple exclamation points or capitalized words. It's a minor miracle that business gurus, like the ever-enthusiastic Tom Peters, can get an exclaimed word in edge-wise via electronic communications.

Then again, Peters delivers many of his messages via the Web and his own blogs. Those mediums tolerate expressive (and salacious) language. On the Web, not incidentally, you'll find Carlin's seven dirty words. Just go to his site.

Of course, business customers don't want to speak dirty to their customers, but they should be able to say what they mean.

Susan is the Editorial Director at BeTuitive Marketing. Susan's articles have been published in both the print and online versions of a variety of publications including Investor's Business Daily, the Boston Herald, Fortune magazine's Technology Buyer's Guide, InfoWorld and the Chicago Tribune. She swears she never swears in an email, but she does like to issue a good "*@%!!*@" now and again.

Copyright © 2005 BeTuitive Marketing

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