After a bit of tweaking, we discovered that Thunderbird systematically throws up this alert when it sees a URLs in your HTML email copy. In this case, we had made the mistake of adding the following line:

If you would like to support the National Wildlife Federation in protecting wildlife and their habitats, kindly donate at http://killspill.org/.

This isn’t just a Thunderbird filter, many of the spamfilters out there including those at the various webmail providers and those built into desktop email clients look at the same thing.

In some cases, they throw up a warning when the text in the <a href=”"> tag is different from the visible text. For example:

<a href=”http://clickthroughlink.esp.domain.com”> http://killspill.org</a>

will trigger a warning in many email clients while

<a href=”http://killspill.org/”>http://killspill.org/</a>

won’t generate a warning.  But in some clients, including apparently Thunderbird, the link <a href=”http://killspill.org/”> http://killspill.org/</a> will cause a scam warning.

These warnings themselves are a good thing. Overall, there are a lot of phishers and scammers use mis-matching links to attempt to deceive recipients into clicking on http://spammersite.com/ because they think they’re visiting http://amazon.com/.

Best practices are all about things that are safe. If you do these things, in all likelihood you will not encounter any major problems. The things we tell people are best practices are not written in stone and inviolable. Rather, they’re a way to succeed without understanding all the ins and outs of email.

The key to violating best practices is to know why the recommendation is a best practice. Take, for example, practices relating to email design. Best practices say that emails should not be image only and they should be designed in such a way that users don’t have to scroll sideways. However, StyleCampaign recently reported on a campaign from the Canadian Tourist Board that violated both of these best practices.

The email was laid out as a maze, requiring the user to scroll around the message to find the call to action. The designers have reported they are quite pleased with how successful the campaign was received.

So, yes, Justin, you can violate best practices and it is OK. Best practices are not laws, they are guides. If you know what pitfalls the best practices are helping you avoid, then you can violate those guides without problems.