It’s safe to say that we all get way too much unwanted email (spam) nowadays. Although we try to cloak our email addresses on our websites (more on this in a minute) and we may even go so far as using ‘throw away’ email addresses, we somehow always seem to end up with inboxes filled with spam.
If you identify with the above scenario, you might want to try these steps to help improve the situation:
1) Give up trying to control spam. This is an exercise in futility. You’ll never not get spam (unless you use step 4) so, face the fact that it’s here, it’s not going anywhere anytime soon and in the interim you need to adopt a healthy attitude towards it. It is what it is.
2) Don’t cloak your email address – too much. Many people are used to seeing LWest at xynoMedia dot com but, LWest [at] xynoMedia [dot] c o m is total overkill. Yes, e-mail address cloaking makes it hard for spambots (mini-programs designed to harvest e-mail addresses from websites) to grab your e-mail address but it also makes it that much harder for potential clients and the media to contact you.
3) Sort first. When you open your inbox for the day, go through all your new e-mail and weed out the spam all in one run. This way you can spend the rest of your time focusing on the email that really requires your attention as opposed to sorting through spam the whole time you’re processing your inbox.
4) Use challenge/response software. This is really the only foolproof way to eliminate spam. You’ve seen it…you send an email to someone and right away you get an email asking you to click or type something in order for your email to be delivered. The idea being that spambots aren’t smart enough (yet) to do this. The sender only has to do this once and you can set up the software so that anyone who’s currently in your address book doesn’t have to go through the challenge/response process. Everyone I know who has used this loves it to the max.
5) Don’t use e-mail filters. Some e-mail filters are good, some are not but largely all of them depend on how well they’re set up. I have yet to see a filter that has not inadvertently filtered out a ‘good’ email under the assumption that it was spam. That ‘good’ email could be an email from a friend – not a big deal. But, it could be from a potential client or a media source looking for an interview – very big deal. And, no matter how often we think we’ll check our filters, I can’t tell you how many times people get busy and forget. Why leave such an important piece of your business’ communication to an inanimate sorting system?
Try these ideas and let me know what works for you.
This entry was posted on Saturday, July 28th, 2007 at 10:37 am and is filed under E-mail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.Leave a Reply
