Protecting your Email Box from Unwanted Spam

People complain all the time about the legitamacy of email marketing. How can I get rid of all this spam? Every email account I have is filled with spam, what do I do? These are very common questions I get when explaining how to avoid getting the masses of unwanted emails that flood are box. Make no mistake, most of what the user is recieveing is pure spam. Here is the best tried and true way to avoid getting those spam messages.
Create two email accounts. One for all your online ecommerce purchases and online activity, one for your personal day to day emails from bosses, co-workers, friends and family.
This is the #1 way to curb your enthusiasm for spam! Let me explain.

When you purchase services or goods on the internet, almost always your email will be used for verification purposes. Confirming the email verifies that your email address is a valid address to the website. However, when you purchased your product, did you look at their privacy policy? Was there any verbage that states that you might be recieveing 3rd party offers or be automatically signed up for a newsletter? Ah, ha! Here’s where you run into trouble. The privacy policy of the website states the intention of what your data will be used for. The policy must be clear in order to be Can-Spam compliant. If the privacy policy states that you might be recieveing 3rd party offers, you can almost guarantee that you will be recieving a load of junk mail. Even worse, much of the time these lists get passed around to other email marketers. You can see how over time that just signing up to one of these sites can overload your box with junk.

Additionally, the spam problem is not limited to eccomerece sites. Using your email to sign up to forums, message boards, dating sites, social networking sites, or any website that requires you to register via email can cotribute to the spam problem. These websites are just liek ecommerce sites in that sometimes your email can be passed around. I’ve even seen high quality fortune 500 companies show up on some email lists. These email lists weren’t opted in to the email marketing company. They were aquired as purchased data! So be very careful when registering your email anywhere.

The Solution

The solution is simple. Do not signup for anything with your personal email. Your personal email is used for one purpose, communication. There is no way for other marketers or spammers to get a hold of your email if you don’t give it out. Also, if you happen to slip up and start receving spam messages, have no fear. these days the unsubscribe button is an affective way to opt-out. Even more so than an ISP’s “This is spam” button. The unsubscribe process is automatic, handled by a machine, not a human. When you unsubscribe, your email is automatically removed from the database. Thus the next email blast which gets sent out will not include your email.

Filed under: Inbox Truth

Leave a Reply