Yahoo! recently released the Yahoo! Mail Visualization tool. The tool shows how Yahoo! routes billions of emails every day. It also gives us some insight into how they filter spam.
Here is a quick screen shot of the Mail Visualization map (click on the image for a larger version)
Click on an area of the map zoom in and provide you with additional data of emails in that area.
Clicking on the green “Trending Keywords” box on the left will show you the top keywords in email subject lines for the geographic area you have selected. The “Reveal Blocked Spam” green button on the bottom gives you an idea of how much spam is being blocked. For example, this morning 4 spam messages are being blocked for every good email that is delivered.
You will also notice that when you click on the Reveal Blocked Spam, you can also see the spam keywords show up in the trending graph as well as the word cloud. The spam words are color coded gray.
Spend a little time with this tool and you may be surprised to find that many words that people have told you are spam triggers (like “Free”) show up as “Good” keywords in the visualization tool.
Bill Brelsford Small Business Marketing Consultant
