Spam Not

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"Spam not, lest ye be ...
~Mari ... ...
I received over 40,000 emails from a ... had ...
a contact email address from one of ... The person may or may not have "Spam not, lest ye be spammed." ~Mari PeckhamJust yesterday, I received over 40,000 emails from a personwho had harvested a contact email address from one of mywebsites.
The person may or may not have personally securedmy email address, but since I use it only to receive emailfeedback from my website and never to send mail, I know thatit was a harvested address. Because of the nature of my useof this email address, I also have a "Thank you forcontacting us." autoresponder message in place there.My server was mad at me.
My entire system was mad at me. Icouldn't conduct my normal business and send out email thatneeded to be sent out, because my computer was hard at workdownloading email upon email.How can something like this happen?Simple enough, really.
My email was picked up off of mywebsite and added to an autoresponder. If it had been aregular email account, I would have received an unsolicitedmessage that I would have easily deleted, no big deal.
Butsince my email address was attached to an autoresponder, itstarted a vicious cycle of email autoresponse.The person who had sent me the email - well, they ended upwith 40,000 "Thank you for contacting us." emails in theirbox 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 evenrealized that they had done anything wrong.Spam is bad. Not all spammers are bad people, though.
Someof them are just misinformed or inexperienced Internetmarketers.I'm the first to admit that marketing can be frustrating.Just when you've hit the wall and can't think of anotherfresh marketing idea to get new people to your site, alongcomes a company that offers you a list of 100,000 emailaddresses for just $24.95 or some other unbelievable deal.Wow! What an opportunity! Affordable, even! It's hard notto jump all over an offer like that.But beware! It's hard to say where those email addressesare coming from.Many unscrupulous companies use "harvesting" software thatspiders the Internet and lifts email address off ofwebsites. They then compile lists of these email addressesand sell them as "opt-in safelists" for profit.As a marketer, using these lists can get you in tons oftrouble.
Once labeled as a Spammer, it is hard to ridyourself of that reputation, whether you were spamming onpurpose, or you were a victim of a bad "list". You can bedropped from your hosting service or ISP.
Companies thatyou are promoting using Spam will cancel your accounts.Bottom line: If you are not sure that it is NOT Spam, thendon't do it. Develop your own list of opt-in subscribers byoffering a newsletter, free information, or something elsethat will get people to take notice of you.
BothYahooGroups (http://groups.yahoo.com/) and Topica(http://www.topica.com) offer free, easy-to-use service thatwill manage your subscribers for you. You can find othersimilar services on the Internet.
This is one of the mostresponsive forms of advertising, because you have theopportunity to develop a relationship with your listmembers.You can also use a mailing list building service, such asFree Mailer 2000 (http://www.freemailer2000.com), althoughyou will need to advertise your mailing list builder site inorder to build your mailing list.Safelists can be another safe way to get the word out aboutyour business, but vary in responsiveness. I recommend theservices of SafeListBoys (http://www.safelistboys.com) tohelp you find lists and easily manage your safelist activityfor a small monthly fee.
You can also find new safelists byentering "safelists" in any search engine, but watch out forthose "BULK" mailing list services that may fall in theunscrupulous SPAM category. Rule of thumb, if you aren't amember 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 begetting you a handful of responses right now, but thepainful consequences of your actions can cancel out anybenefits that you may find.If we, as an Internet marketing community, would all agreeto market responsibly, the Internet would soon be a betterplace to work and live. What comes around goes around.Spam not, lest ye be spammed.
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