I share your frustration. Spam drives us all insane.

At one point, I was receiving on average 200 pieces of spam per day…even though we have server side spam filter. I was forced to add a second spam filter to Outlook, and while it stopped the messages from getting to my inbox, I still had to wait for Outlook to download all those messages.

Luckily, our IT guy was able to fix the server-side filtering and now only a few come through a week (that changed my life).

Occasionally we’re asked by legit companies about buying email lists and doing email blasts. We’re uncomfortable with that because we’ve found that a large portion of these “opt-in” lists aren’t opt-in at all. Even when they are, a significant portion of the people on these lists don’t recall opting in, so to them, the messages are still spam.

Besides, I doubt the people on those lists ever agreed to “sell my email address to everyone that will buy it because I’m interested in just about anything you have to sell.

I suggest the book “Permission Marketing” by Seth Godin to anyone that’s thinking about using email. Although it’s been out for sometime, Godin does a good job of explaining what a permission asset is and how to use email to market responsibly.

Keep up the great posts.

Patrick Byers
Outsource Marketing
http://outsourcemarketing.com

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