Spam and spammers – we all get our share and unfortunately, it’s now a part of the internet that we cannot escape – or can we?
Well, not exactly but there are some steps you can take to at least push the spam out of your life so that it does not consume your inbox.
For me, running a home business efficiently online means I need to keep the amount of junk and spam to a minimum.
The problem really came to light when my main email address for one of my primary domains became flooded with spam. That address had a bulls eye on it apparently. And truthfully, I did it to myself.
It got to the point where it was painful to filter through hundreds of emails to determine what applied to my home business and what was just plain junk – most of it falls in to the latter category.
See, there are ways to keep good control over the spam which I did not follow and I want to share what I’m doing now so hopefully you can avoid my mistake.
The mistake – I used my main email address to sign up for what I thought was a trusted source (no names here) but turns out, once I unsubscribed, I got bombed with spam. I’ve now been fairly careful with what I use my main email address for and use multiple gmail accounts to opt in to most everything.
It took me a while to figure out which source and that was only because I went back and re-subscribed to my main lists with a new gmail account using some tricks that gmail allows so I could track which was the offending source.
The lesson I learned is never use your primary email address to subscribe to anything, either personal or for your home business. Only give that precious email address to those you absolutely trust. Yes, this won’t prevent someone with a virus on their PC having their address book swiped for spam but if you follow these steps, it will help.
So I ‘rebooted’ my email address policy and I did it like this.
First of all I resigned all of my main email addresses that were getting spam to a catchall folder I can go back to and review to delete those that are invalid (there are hundreds each day!). Then I resubscribed to my main sites with a newly formatted gmail address using a period [ . ] in the email address plus some variations for each site. Examples are;
* GeorgeBush@gmail.com
* G.eorgeBush@gmail.com
* Ge.orgeBush@gmail.com
* GeorgeBus.h@gmail.com
* GeorgeBush@googlemail.com
* G.eorgeBush@googlemail.com
* Ge.orgeBush@googlemail.com
You can also use the ‘+’ sign in your email address to append – for example, GeorgeBush+thatwebsite@gmail.com to further segment the email addresses and by using the plus and the period in multiple variations, you can create as many as you want.
To learn more about using this trick, visit 1 Awesome Gmail Trick You Don’t Know About
The purpose of this is to track where spam is coming from. By setting up filters in your gmail to label emails based on the address you used, you can quickly see who is either sharing your email address or who has websites that are scraped often by spammers for email harvesting.
Once I did this, I easily identified the ‘trusted’ source by unsubscribing to all of the lists and seeing which ones generated spam. Since I had only used each new address for one specific list and nothing else, it was easy to see who the culprit was. The spam flood started within 24 hours which got me to thinking.
Some markters have huge lists but no doubt they have even larger unsubscribe lists. What do they do with them? Well, ethical marketers will simply delete or purge them from their responder systems (some auto purge) but not everyone is a Boy Scout/Girl Scout online. That means unethical marketers MUST be selling off the list of unsubscribed addresses which brings me to another point.
Greed – one thing I see clearly is the internet marketing arena is driven by greed in far too many cases. How far will online marketers go to make a buck?
So what can we do about it? Nothing really – it is what it is. What you can do is follow a policy that allows you to control your email addresses and who has them.
If a site turns out to be one I really love and like, then I may go back and subscribe with one of my main addresses but in light of what I know now, I’ll just keep using the modified gmail addresses going forward and I recommend you do the same.
Thank you Google!
