So Many Words About Spam, Email, and Deliverability

As I have mentioned before: The actual, correct count of page views for Spam Resource is lost to the mists of time. While I moved the blog to Google's Blogger platform way back in August, 2006, the current version of their (very simple) analytics and page view tracking only goes back as far as early 2010. So while the stats now say we've crossed five million page views, I'm happy to point out that the number is quite arbitrary, and must actually be a bit higher. Not bad for a lightly read little blog about the weird corners of email technology.

While it's not easy to correctly count the page views, it is easy to correctly count the words. Well, sort of. Occasionally posts may get unpublished (they generally have to be REALLY old and out of date before I'll do that, and even then, I do it very sparingly -- I am not a fan of digital bit rot). And I lost a handful of posts at least once thanks to an obscure technical error. And what about guest posts? And how do I extract it all from the blog's XML while matching only words and not proper names?

So here goes nothing.

Over the years, best as I can tell, I've racked up 468,395 words about spam (the bad kind), SPAM (the tasty kind), blocklists, BIMI, DMARC, SPF, DKIM, Apple MPP, Gmail quirks, dead domains, feedback loops, bad bounces, and random Friday Fun. From the daily inbox messes to the big policy shifts at Google and Yahoo, it's all fair game here.

And, because I enjoy visualizing data from time to time, let's do that with those words. First, the word cloud with this post was made from feeding every one of words into the lovely word cloud generator at WordClouds.com.

And then, I generated my own word ranking. Of those nearly five hundred thousand words, what shows up most often? Here's a peek at the top fifty (with various non-email/tech high frequency and function words excluded, and with plurals matching singulars):

1. email (I guess this makes sense!)
2. domain
3. from
4. mail
5. spam (goes without saying)
6. address
7. message
8. sender
9. deliverability (I'm surprised deliverability wasn't ranked higher, but at least it made the top ten!)
10. Gmail (first provider mention!)
11. list
12. sending
13. DMARC (yay, email authentication!)
14. provider
15. Google (there's our friend again!)
16. IP (...address, I assume!)
17. Yahoo (another good friend of the inbox!)
18. service
19. people
20. help
21. issues
22. good
23. mailbox
24. data
25. platform
26. Microsoft (another very important mailbox provider!)
27. DKIM
28. ISP
29. marketing
30. inbox
31. reputation
32. bad
33. BIMI
34. Apple
35. server
36. information
37. authentication
38. bits
39. accounts
40. support
41. tool
42. subscriber
43. SPF
44. click
45. report
46. link
47. DNS
48. resource
49. policy
50. Spamhaus

These sum up the things I care about, write about, and often complain about, the most. And after all those words and all those page views, I'm still not done. Thanks for reading, asking, arguing, sharing, and sometimes correcting my typos.

I hope you'll stick around, as there's plenty more spam fighting and email deliverability best practices to write about. If you haven't already, subscribe here so you don't miss future words.