Five Rules of Post-SoBig Society

Aug 28th, 2003 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: News

I think the author of this article might be taking things a little to the extreme. E-mail is not working so great this week, that’s for sure. But it’s always gonna be fine for one-to-one communication. Our spam filters did great this week. Unfortunately, if you’re writing to us from an @aol, @hotmail or @yahoo account, your mail is sitting in a “quarantine bin.”

Few professionals (and that includes most of your target audience) are stopping to look at anything coming from those domains anymore. It’s because those domains are “spoofed” most often into spam. Free=unread.

Rule #1: Either get your own domain name, or use a messaging service with a proven track record of busting through spam filters. (Or do both.)
Rule #2: For your newsletter, use a list hosting service that has relationships with major server admins. Again, this might cost you more, but it will get your message through.
Rule #3: Encourage your audience members to enter you into their “whitelist” before they forget they signed up for your list.
Rule #4: Use a good spam filter solution yourself, to keep your own inbox manageable. Rule #5: Remind folks when you communicate on your site that if you don’t respond, assume their message is in the filter. People are starting to get it.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Add to:
Bloglines | | Digg it | Y! MyWeb

Leave a Reply

You May Also Be Interested In...

That Elusive Work/Life Balance

Kevin Salwen notes that, in today's society, it's nearly impossible to achieve the true "work/life balance" we seek. It is,...
Comments Policy
Some housekeeping... Because we've been getting deluged with comment spam, I wanted to reiterate our public comments policy. Comments are generally left...
Your CD on Amazon? Yes!
"Dude, how did you get Amazon to carry your CD?" There's no secret to getting your CD sold through Amazon. Kevin...
He’s sitting with people he doesn’t even know!
How you act "in person" with your audience defines who you are as a person. (Even though this example is...
E-Mail Still Rules, 11% of the time.
From usability guru Jakob Nielsen: E-newsletters that are informative, convenient, and timely are often preferred over other media. However, a new...