Bayesian Email Filter Sets My Benign Email as Spam

[blitzen]

I noticed that the Bayesian Filter on one of my customer's emails shows the email that I sent to them was labeled as "spam".

We communicate only about orders and merchandise that the customer asks about.
We never ever send spam or mass mailings.

This email had only 4 links: two were to products that the customer was asking about, one back to our website and one to the Better Business Bureau.
It was sent as plain text with no images.
There was no misspelled words.

When the customer replied to my email, the subject had this prepended and appended to it
[SPAM] - My subject to customer - Bayesian Filter detected spam

Can anyone help me determine what may have flagged the filter to set my email message as spam so that I can avoid this?

[wige]

The Bayesian filtering takes into account a wide variety of factors to determine if a message is spam, where the overall message is given a score that must be within the tolerances set by the user. False positives are fairly common, and it can be hard to predict as different systems weight the various factors differently.

If you do a Google search for e-mail spam tests you should find a variety of online utilities you can use to check your e-mail and get an idea of parts of the message that triggered the spam flag.

[imvain2]

I'm not sure on how Bayesian does the errors, like if they place them in the header of the message itself.

But.... you could always ask your client to forward you the message that they received from you with the full email headers. Then you can see the spam scores that the mail program gave to your message. Then simply do a Google Search for each of those scores and it will tell you what those messages mean.

Wondering how to get the email headers?? It depends on their email client.

[webwest]

I know you'd like to know the reason why your email got tagged as spam but if you just have your client whitelist your email address none of your emails to him will be tagged as spam. Even too many links in an email signature can sometimes set of a spam filter ...

[kgun]

Originally Posted by blitzen

Can anyone help me determine what may have flagged the filter to set my email message as spam so that I can avoid this?

No, but I can make a qualified guess. May be the link to the Better Business Bureau in combination with other links.

Originally Posted by blitzen

When the customer replied to my email, the subject had this prepended and appended to it
[SPAM] - My subject to customer - Bayesian Filter detected spam

1. Does your customer know Bayesian filtering?
2. If yes, which specific filter raised the spam flag? A Kalman filter is an example of a recursive empirical Bayesian filter.
3. Is the parameters of the filter too sensitive?

[claybutler]

My filter will occasionally tag good email as spam but let them through anyway with the word "spam" appended to the subject line. It's like the email is borderline and the filter wants me to make the call. Not sure what you can do about (unless it's an obvious gaffe) as everyone's spam filters are set differently (or not set at all). I train mine regularly so it's set to catch the specific types of email I get. Another person's filter will filter differently.

[Uncle Dog]

Originally Posted by claybutler

I train mine regularly so it's set to catch the specific types of email I get. Another person's filter will filter differently.

I often come across 'rubbish' spam filters 'not working' simply because the user was unaware that they needed to learn how to use it (just like the 2 year out of date anti-virus).

EDIT: and now that I've considered my post I think it should say - I often come across 'rubbish' SOFTWARE 'not working' simply because the user was unaware that they needed to learn how to use it

EDIT2: and HARDWARE