How can I avoid looking like a Phisher?

In a promising move, some email clients are building phishing detection right into the software itself. Phishing basically refers to an email that fraudulently tries to get information off someone by pretending to be someone else. I'm sure that like me, most of you have received a few PayPal phishing scams in your time.

Both Mozilla Thunderbird and AOL 9.0 now feature phishing scam detection that will impact on how you design your email creative. To determine if an email may be a phishing scam, the email client looks for a link in your HTML campaign where the display text is a URL. If the displayed link is different from the actual URL, the user is alerted.

The Problem

Remember, we change every link in your HTML campaigns so we can track link clicks for you. This means that even when you have a link like:

http://www.yoursite.com

We'll change that to something like:

http://www.yoursite.com

This change will mean that your email may get flagged as a phishing scam.

The Solution

To ensure you never look like a phisher, avoid using a URL as the display text for a link in any HTML emails. Instead, try and use a word or phrase which describes the link itself. Such as:

Visit our website

Even though we'll change that to something like:

Visit our website

You won't ever be identified as a potential phishing scammer.