That's the headline of a story in the Times this morning - which, as my colleague William has pointed out, is one of the all-time great headlines.
Yesterday I was talking at the IDM about email creative and as normal a question came up along the lines of "can I use FREE in an email subject line".
The answer is probably yes. If you run FREE through SpamAssassin it does give you a negative score of 1.0, but that generally won't be enough to prevent your email from getting delivered - particularly if you have a generally good reputation score.
Generally speaking we could be much much braver with headlines. And to prove the point, I did a quick check on The Times' headline - and it too would have got through SpamAssassin pretty much unscathed. Of course, had the journalist been more precise, using brand names of drugs and perhaps quoting prices, then we might have more of a mountain to climb.
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Yesterday I was talking at the IDM about email creative and as normal a question came up along the lines of "can I use FREE in an email subject line".
The answer is probably yes. If you run FREE through SpamAssassin it does give you a negative score of 1.0, but that generally won't be enough to prevent your email from getting delivered - particularly if you have a generally good reputation score.
Generally speaking we could be much much braver with headlines. And to prove the point, I did a quick check on The Times' headline - and it too would have got through SpamAssassin pretty much unscathed. Of course, had the journalist been more precise, using brand names of drugs and perhaps quoting prices, then we might have more of a mountain to climb.