Spam Not

"Spam not, lest ye be spammed." ~Mari Peckham

Just yesterday, I received over 40,000 emails from a person
who had harvested a contact email address from one of my
websites. The person may or may not have personally secured
my email address, but since I use it only to receive email
feedback from my website and never to send mail, I know that
it was a harvested address. Because of the nature of my use
of this email address, I also have a "Thank you for
contacting us." autoresponder message in place there.

My server was mad at me. My entire system was mad at me. I
couldn't conduct my normal business and send out email that
needed to be sent out, because my computer was hard at work
downloading email upon email.

How can something like this happen?

Simple enough, really. My email was picked up off of my
website and added to an autoresponder. If it had been a
regular email account, I would have received an unsolicited
message that I would have easily deleted, no big deal. But
since my email address was attached to an autoresponder, it
started a vicious cycle of email autoresponse.

The person who had sent me the email - well, they ended up
with 40,000 "Thank you for contacting us." emails in their
box from me.

I'm sure that that wasn't very pleasant for them, either.
And the fact of the matter is that they may have not even
realized that they had done anything wrong.

Spam is bad. Not all spammers are bad people, though. Some
of them are just misinformed or inexperienced Internet
marketers.

I'm the first to admit that marketing can be frustrating.
Just when you've hit the wall and can't think of another
fresh marketing idea to get new people to your site, along
comes a company that offers you a list of 100,000 email
addresses for just $24.95 or some other unbelievable deal.
Wow! What an opportunity! Affordable, even! It's hard not
to jump all over an offer like that.

But beware! It's hard to say where those email addresses
are coming from.

Many unscrupulous companies use "harvesting" software that
spiders the Internet and lifts email address off of
websites. They then compile lists of these email addresses
and sell them as "opt-in safelists" for profit.

As a marketer, using these lists can get you in tons of
trouble. Once labeled as a Spammer, it is hard to rid
yourself of that reputation, whether you were spamming on
purpose, or you were a victim of a bad "list". You can be
dropped from your hosting service or ISP. Companies that
you are promoting using Spam will cancel your accounts.

Bottom line: If you are not sure that it is NOT Spam, then
don't do it. Develop your own list of opt-in subscribers by
offering a newsletter, free information, or something else
that will get people to take notice of you. Both
YahooGroups (http://groups.yahoo.com/) and Topica
(http://www.topica.com) offer free, easy-to-use service that
will manage your subscribers for you. You can find other
similar services on the Internet. This is one of the most
responsive forms of advertising, because you have the
opportunity to develop a relationship with your list
members.

You can also use a mailing list building service, such as
Free Mailer 2000 (http://www.freemailer2000.com), although
you will need to advertise your mailing list builder site in
order to build your mailing list.

Safelists can be another safe way to get the word out about
your business, but vary in responsiveness. I recommend the
services of SafeListBoys (http://www.safelistboys.com) to
help you find lists and easily manage your safelist activity
for a small monthly fee. You can also find new safelists by
entering "safelists" in any search engine, but watch out for
those "BULK" mailing list services that may fall in the
unscrupulous SPAM category. Rule of thumb, if you aren't a
member yourself and know for a fact that the list is opt-in,
don't use it!

If you are choosing to spam, stop immediately. It may be
getting you a handful of responses right now, but the
painful consequences of your actions can cancel out any
benefits that you may find.

If we, as an Internet marketing community, would all agree
to market responsibly, the Internet would soon be a better
place to work and live. What comes around goes around.
Spam not, lest ye be spammed.