Hello, is not dangerous to pus these on your site? i mean your website could not be marked as "spam" ?

Thanks for this --- uber-useful.  
 
2 questions, please: 
 
1. Where did this list come from? 
 
2. What are your thoughts on the trade-off between getting filtered out of some email inboxes for using these spammy words... and making it through to other inboxes where phrases like "save $" may increase the likelihood of an email getting opened?  
 
Again, thanks! I've bookmarked the list. :)

Hello, my name is Pablo Padula, journalist and writer, seaching for the right information on the new online marketing trends for my website http://www.makemoney2012.net. Can anybody guide me in the right direction? Who knows about it? Thanks!!!

Content filtering hasn't been a big component of spam filtering algorithms for nearly a decade. Sender reputation and increasingly engagement metrics are way more important. Any marketer with half-decent permission and list management practices will be able to use these words and phrases without worry.

Karen, this post is very, very, very misinformative. Actually spam filters CAN NOT be avoided by changing your email's subject line. 
As Chad said above, these types of "dumb" filtering has long been largely replaced by content, engagement and reputation type filtering. And for the right reasons, subjectline filtering is too easy to trick and that is exactly why it isn’t effective. For e-mail marketers having true deliverability problems, these lists will not solve any of their problems. As for the rest, avoiding these words will not have any real impact on deliverability either. What does work is sending email that people want to receive, take care when building a quality list and having the right technical protocols in place. 
 
I would consider it graceful if Hubspot would replace this post with an article called "why spammy words in subjectlines dont really matter." 
 
 
Jordie van Rijn 
- Email Monday

@Joanna - this is not useful; it's crap. Don't waste your time worrying about this that or the other word. It's an old wives tail from the '90s that doesn't matter or apply today.  
 
 
 
@Pablo - You seem to look a lot like a forum spambot; I doubt you're a real person as your post is basically nonsensical to the topic. But in sweet irony you act as an example that the author of this post wouldn't know spam if it was commented to their post. 
 
 
 
@Chad & Jordie - keep up the good work of calling out BS when you see it!

...um, why is everyone commenting so angry?  
 
I think the author just needs to go ahead and tell us where this all came from, and that context may help.

Karen, I hate to pile on here...but this post truly is irresponsible. 
 
Let's simply to take one word in your list: "free." Stop. Now open up Gmail or whatever email account you use for personal email and do a search on the word "free" or better yet the phrase "free shipping." 
 
Now especially look at the period leading up to Christmas. A significant percentage of the emails from retailers very successfully use "free shipping" in their subject lines. 
 
And they do so for a reason - it works. And they aren't getting blocked or filtered. If they do it is for other reasons. 
 
Looking forward to a correction. 
 
Thanks, 
 
Loren McDonald 
Silverpop

@Joanna - I can take a good guess at where the list came from. People are angry because this is dated and out of context yet presented in a way that if you avoid this list of words you increase your odds of making it to the Inbox. That's not fair to people that don't know any better and does nothing to raise the industry intelligence bar. It's phoning it in for the sake of pageviews. 
 
There's a long long way to go before this that or the other word will make a difference. If you're not making it into the Inbox changing the words you use isn't going to make a difference.

I'm with Chad, Jordie and John. Its highly unlikely these word will be an issue unless you are already well on the edge with reputation. 
 
I worry far more about other factors such as engagement, spam complaints, bounces and unsubscribes than content.

I think you'd be surprised by how many online marketers believe that 'spam words' still really matter...  
 
The last two email marketing managers I wrote copy for explicitly asked me to take certain phrases out --- and, to be totally honest, one of them (whom I worked in-house with) said she learned that from silverpop. Sorry, silverpop. :( That was about 3 years ago, in your defense.  
 
When did words like these stop mattering?

Oh my, we stirred up quite some controversy! Let me clarify our position - there are many things that impact email deliverability, one of which is the inclusion of spammy keywords in your subject line. You can find a listing of others here or here or here. We're always open to new information, though, so keep sharing other reputable insights that you find. 
 
Thanks for reading and commenting!

Joanna - thanks for the comments. 
1) Content and specifically certain words can and still do matter - but less so than many years ago. "Aggressive" and "spammy" words can impact different senders differently. A sender with a great reputation can probably use just about any words they want not be impacted at the major ISPs. A sender with a poor reputation and/or multiple other issues with a specific email, might be filtered because of the cummulative affect. 
 
2. To the above point, most all ISP spam filters are based on a cummulative score - many are based on this test list from SpamAssassin - http://spamassassin.apache.org/tests.html - which is probably where the author got the list. So use of a single word is not likely to be an issue, but the combination of several factors including reputation, abuse complaints, etc and content score. But as others have pointed out, in recent years the ISPs have placed much more emphasis on reputation than content. 
 
3. I can't speak to a conversation from a fellow employee 3 years ago to a client. The advice might have been spot on if the client was having deliverability challenges and they were trying to isolate what was causing the issue.  
 
Loren McDonald

@Joanna - they stopped mattering 4 years ago.... Naw, just kidding :) 
 
SpamAssassin, the most widely used spam scoring tool, still assigns weighted values to some words; like all of the words listed above. SpamAssassin still matters, but ISPs have been using an IP based reputation method for quite some time and have more recently been adding in domain reputation, too, so it's a combination of many things; not just a list of words to avoid. 
 
A lot more than 3-4 years ago I worked for a little company that had "free" and "credit" in their name (and obviously URL), and I can't tell you how many "informed" and "learned" people would tell me that I'd never make it to the Inbox. With millions of subscribers our measured Inbox deliverability was in the 90% range. That's real deliverability, not sent minus bounced. We used a little tool that used to be Assurance Systems that's now ReturnPath. 
 
But we don't even need to get into that; all one needs to do is look at their own Inbox to see that this is basically bunk and a disservice to those that don't know any better - but it does get pageviews, so if that's the measure of success then score! If the measure of success is educating people; fail.... 
 
 
 
@Karen - none of what Chad, Jordie, Loren, Tim, or myself has said is anything new. You guys like to tweet me posts to make your point (like this one from Al Iverson that you obviously didn't read http://blog.exacttarget.com/blog/al-iverson/spam-filter-trigger-words-are-important), but to support my position here's a post of mine. From three years ago. About first-hand experience from many years before that http://redpillemail.com/blog/2009/email-marketing-urban-legends.html 
 
I've been around long enough that I probably have original copies of this tripe from the 90s. When it comes to email marketing you all really need to stop phoning it in and maybe do a little homework before hitting the "post" button. Oh yeah, and maybe do a LinkedIn search on the people that you're arguing with before you hit that Send button, too.... just sayin'....

I am enjoying the dialog that your article has prompted. I noticed that the email that I received from you offering this article has one of the phrases on your list that we're supposed to avoid: "email marketing". I guess this is a case of "do as I say, not as I do". :-)

I've been working on an email all day for a client, who initially declined the recommendation of the ESP's spam filter tests. However, test emails to 10 internal recipients were caught in each of our filters for content, not subject line. Three rewrites later, we have a passing email, without trigger words. Our email SOP will be amended to included checking subject and content for spam filter trigger words, but we will try to write our emails initially without the words. 
 
This issue lead me to search for a total list, and behold, our own CMS provider HubSpot has a blog written today on the subject. 
 
Thank you Karen. The list has purpose. If you're a marketer who wants to get your message in front of your targets, i think you should heed this advice and work around email trigger words in subject line and content. not a myth.  
 
I will share this in our HubSpot User Group (HUG Atl) tonight!  
 
/mh

Martine, as others have said, it's got far more to do with Reputation that it does with any "trigger" words, the sheer amount of emails in my various inboxes with "free" in the subject line can attest to that, as can all the other subject lines that break any supposed "spam trigger lists"

Ironically, when I tried to send this article from my Google Reader to my email, it actually get labelled as spam too..