The Little Black Book of Online Business: 1001 Insider Resources Every Business Owner Needs

Chapter 69. Spam

I have a friend who never had Internet service in her home until 2008.

Upon getting online, she quickly proceeded to sign up for a handful of free offers; as a result, within a week she had more than 2,000 spam e-mails. Ugh! I think she'll be getting a new e-mail address soon.

So, how do you fight the incessant bombardment to your in-box? For business owners, this is a tricky question, because if the controls you implement are too restrictive, you'll miss out on legitimate (and possibly critical) e-mails from your customers and business associates.

One of the first steps is to set up different e-mail addresses for different purposes, and then set up different spam countermeasures for each address.

You should have one e-mail address that you use only for personal correspondence. This should not be filtered in any way.

Create another e-mail address for your customers. Unless you start seeing some abuse, you shouldn't filter this e-mail address, either. (Also, consider giving customers a link to your help desk page instead of an e-mail address.)

Never use the aforementioned e-mail addresses when you're signing up for newsletters, e-zines, or autoresponders of any kind. Don't use them when you place an online order. For those functions, have a different e-mail address—this one will be filtered aggressively.

When I speak of filtering, I'm talking about using the antispam features of your e-mail software. Most e-mail clients have this, and you can tweak the settings ...