By Rich Eichacker
Vibrance Technology Corporation
Is your InBox filling up with junk? Here are a few tips on reducing the clutter.
Don't reply to spam. Typically, e-mail marketers use this tactic to verify your e-mail address. Instead, use some of the strategies below.
Make sure you opt out of marketing e-mail when you register at a web site. When you "opt out", it means that you decline to receive marketing e-mails from the company. The trick is to make sure you read and understand the opt out statement. Sometimes you have to check the box, sometimes uncheck it. Usually, you can count on the fact that the default is to opt in. If you forget, and later find you are receiving marketing e-mails, most sites will let you edit your account profile to opt out. amazon.com, for example, has an entire section devoted to e-mail subscriptions in the account maintenance area.
Use different e-mail addresses or mail boxes. This is one of the best ways to segregate commerce e-mail from personal or business-related correspondence. When I purchase products on the net, I use my (free) MSN hotmail account as the e-mail address, eliminating the possibility of receiving junk mail at my regular e-mail account (Yahoo! and Lycos also offer free e-mail accounts). You can retrieve messages from these accounts through their web sites (www.hotmail.com or mail.yahoo.com) or by creating a new identity/account in your e-mail package.
Another strategy is to create additional mailboxes within your domain or ISP account. You can do this if you control the e-mail accounts for your domain or if your ISP account has multiple mailboxes. For example, staples@yourdomain.com or purchases@yourdomain.com, will allow you to route those messages to a separate inbox using a filter.
Creating filters is an effective way to reduce the spam you're already receiving. Filters allow you to take an e-mail message that meets certain criteria and then do something with it, such as delete it or move it to a mail folder. Filters are easy to create, but sometimes must be constructed to check for variations in their criteria. For example, the filtering for a diet program e-mail may need to examine the subject and message text for phrases such as "lose weight", "loose weight" or "lose weight" (2 spaces). E-mail marketers know all the tricks.
Contact your ISP. In the worst case, you may need to notify your ISP or the spammer's ISP about the continued spam. Some ISPs are actually able to implement filtering on their servers, eliminating messages before they reach you.
For additional information on opting out of marketing databases and privacy issues, visit www.ftc.gov/privacy.
Spring 2001 - Volume 11, Number 2