Get Your Emails Organized, Part II : Fight Spam !
By Detlev Reimer
Posted Monday, November 22, 2004
In the last few years the extent of Spam (unsolicited email) has multiplied a hundred times. Have you taken measures to reduce spam to a minimum ? If not, I will give you some hints how you can fight this new evil of the information age.
Those annoying violators of your privacy are not worth your valuable time...
Pseudo Excuses Of Spammers
Those guys hide their shameless behaviour after pseudo excuses like "Thank you for your request" or "Re : More information" , "Thank you very much for your offer", "I saw your ad", "I've just visited your website" etc. - so people could think "Mmmmmmh, I'm not sure if I have NOT requested that stuff or perhaps he has a real request" ; it could be a legal email, though...
Following the rules outlined in this article, you'll be able to free more of your time for doing business again and not getting over- whelmed by a flood of emails.
Use A Different Email Address For All Your Marketing Needs...
I'm almost certain that you will have more than just one email address for your email needs . Or rather not ? Then you are making a big mistake.....
Do you already have your own domain ? With your own website, you will have included a lot of email POP-accounts which are just perfect to fit your desire to be protected against spam . If you don't have your own domain, you should order one ASAP or you are not serious about marketing on the Internet....
You should at least set up the following e-mail accounts :
1.) E-mail for subscriptions to newsletters ONLY -e.g. : ezines@domainname.com
2.) E-mail for private purposes (friends, relatives, colleagues) -e.g. : firstname@yahoo.com , firstname@hotmail.com
3.) E-mail for public ads (public e-mail address ) - e.g. : ads1@domainname.com ---> This Is The Email Address Where SPAM Goes To
4.) E-mail for outgoing ad messages (e.g. if you're the owner of an FFA-page and you send confirmation e-mails; this would be the "sender"-address) ------> This is the email address where you have to deal with autoresponders/undeliverables/ and also SPAM
5.) E-mail for personal marketing contacts only (e.g. contact with other newsletter publishers/JV-partners/affiliates etc.) - e.g. : firstname@domainname.com
And additionally, if you publish an ezine, you'll need these :
6.) E-mail for article submissions -e.g.: articles@domainname.com
7.) E-mail for advertisement info -e.g.: ads@domainname.com or adinfo@domainname.com
Then you create new inboxes for each of these new email accounts . The next step is to set up rules for filtering the incoming emails into the right folders ( described in part I of "Get your emails organized" ) .
With this very basic filtering system, you can categorize your in- coming emails at a glance. You will also be able to delete all spam mails you received with two clicks of your mouse .
The 3 Golden Rules Of Spam Reduction :
NEVER EVER use your private/subscription addresses/marke- ting contacts email addresses for public purposes. Never leave these addresses on websites and don't use them in your email correspondences (except for validation purposes from ezines you are subscribed to, e.g. to get your free ads) !
NEVER EVER post to FFA-pages (by the way, you won't get any results from using them as these pages are hardly ever seen by a human ....- Owning an FFA-page is something different) !
NEVER EVER reply to spammers (this is just a hint for them that the email address is VALID !) !
And last but not least : I've come across a great resource that fights spam with their own methods at :
(http://www.monkeys.com/wpoison/)
This is a cgi-script that fights spam by creating dynamic email- addresses . The harvesting software collects that many email addresses that a lot of them are just rubbish for the owner who uses those methods .
Although you can reduce the amount of spam by adopting the rules and habits I mentioned in this article, I am quite sure that spammers will survive because not everybody knows how to prevent or reduce spam and those intruders will find new victims....
About the Author
Article by Detlev Reimer. Feel free to use the article with these bylines included. Detlev has just finished creating his first product, a database program for Internet marketers which will help you to save and organize e.g. your advertising, customer and contact data. For further details, please visit : (http://www.promobuddy.com/) . Sign up for his newsletter at (http://www.internetmarketing-success.com/).
