I get too much mail in general, and lately it is increasing at an exponential rate. The unfortunate thing is almost all of the increase is spam. This means that more often than not it is taking much longer to reply to real mails than I would like due to the extra work I need to do filtering mail, but if you want a quick reply there are ways to jump the queue of grey mails.
Any of the following "tricks" will help your mail to score higher. They are based on my current mailbox statistics and will change from time to time.
- Sign your mail with GnuPG, I've not seen one advert yet that is cryptographically signed, so any mail that is gets very close to auto-whitelisting even it contains the Nigerian scam. Encrypting your mail with GnuPG also gives the same result, is is quickly becoming my preferred way to receive mail.
- Include the string that will match on the RegExp ^MY_IP: $your_ip_address in the body of your mail. Some leniency is exhibited in matching source IPs, however the closer the IP specified is to the source of the mail the higher the score.
- Don't send HTML... ever. Even if you follow the other rules here for increasing your score your mail will be at the bottom of the pile the moment HTML is found.
- Don't attach files in proprietary or DRM-enabled formats. The slightest whiff of a Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop file places your mail ever so marginally above the HTML containing ones.
- Include a valid hashcash header in your mail, Mail with a hashcash token is moved higher up the priority list based on the collision size.
- Use a decent MUA, just using sylpheed/mutt/thunderbird (with an applicable header) gives your mail a significant score boost.
- Send it to my UKFSN account, my work mailboxes are already huge and also filtered heavily before it even gets to me. A drop in the puddle versus a drop in the ocean.
There is an important point worth noting here, if you decide to use the IP address method even once your future mails which don't contain the method will still score higher as long as they originate from the same mail address.
Basically if you want your mail read fast send me it from something like thunderbird with absolutely no HTML and a GnuPG signature. I'm still not promising same day reply though ;)
Note
I've just started playing with a new idea to weed out some more unwanted mail. It is simple, any mails which quote an entire mail after the "normal" reply text(ie top-posting) will be scored so low it will be bordering on spam classification. And people who use non-standard quote characters or multi-line attribution lines will find the same problem.
Note
All mails with excessive signature blocks are now being marked down. The basic principle is this: 2 lines no problem, 3 lines -10%, 4+ lines -50%. I've decided to drop my whole sig block, as a minor protest at the people who believe it is okay to attach a static list of 5 URIs for projects I don't care that they know about to an email. If only I could figure out some way to not penalise people who at least randomise their sig blocks, but there doesn't appear to be a practical way to go about it(short keeping a database, but it would obviously still penalise people who I've previously not received mail from).