You know the feeling. Another day – another 298 spam emails. And if you are using MS Outlook or Entourage, you probably also know just how ineffective Junk mail filtering at the desktop level can be. So what are you supposed to do about it?
We all know the obvious answers. You know, never buy anything from a spammer, never reply to a spammer, never click the "unsubscribe" link in a spammer's email. And we know what we'd like to do like but can't. You know, pot roast the spammer, send the spammer on vacation to the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier, launch the spammer into deepest outer space.
One morning recently, I was eating some soft-boiled eggs and checking my email when I was spammed upon in a rather unique manner. I received an email from a sender who I never authorized to send me email. Nothing unique about that. I average 298 of those every day. That's over 12 per hour in a 24 hour day.
But this chunk of canned meat was offering to give me a "throwaway" email address so that I could use it on the Internet instead of my regular email address, thus avoiding my regular email address being spammed. I suppose if I clicked on the link, they would ask for my regular email address to verify my honesty. How about that?
Needless to say, I did't click their link – but that email got me thinking. What's the deal with "throwaway" email services? Are they for real? Are they some kind of joke? Is there a better way?
One thing that bothers me about commercially available "throwaway email services" is that they need to verify you in order to serve you. That means giving them your email address – not a very appetizing option in my opinion. If I am trying to protect an email address, why would I want to give it to a complete stranger who requires that they have it in order to protect it. Seems like circular logic and I don't like it.
The alternative that I prefer is to create my own "throwaways" on my own mail server. I have used several of these on all of my email domains and they have been very successful. Just be sure that your incoming mail server isn't set up with a "wild card" to forward any email sent to your domain to you. Using a "wild card" used to be a great idea to keep you from missing emails sent to an inactive address at your domain. But these days, those low-life slugs that send you the endless spam for Cialis, Viagra and others use likely and random addresses at any domain in their sights.
Using "throwaway" email addresses does require a little bit of thought. Let's face – there are some mailing lists you subscribe to that you want to keep getting and when you jettison a throwaway, you might need to re-subscribe to those. This is another reason why RSS subscription is gaining on email for subscribing to information sources you find useful. With RSS (Really Simple Syndication), there is no throwaway email address, no spam and easy subscribe/unsubscribe.
Lately, I have been subscribing using RSS whenever I can. I expect that the future of Internet marketing resides in RSS. But RSS is a media that takes the concept of permission marketing to the limit. If they don't want to see your message they won't. And as yet, there are no tricks that allow the scum of the earth to force their message on you.
So the next time you think about using a throwaway email address to request or subscribe to some information, look for that little RSS icon in your browser's address bar, or click the RSS feed symbol on the web page. Many sites also have "chicklets" (see image at right) that let you click to subscribe directly to the RSS reader you use.
In the past few weeks, I have been forced to face the fact that some Internet marketers who I have previously trusted have either bought or sold my email address without my permission. The evidence is irrefutable. The buyer and seller are guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt. This type of unethical behavior casts a shadow of doubt over every subscription form that requests my email address.
I think that is a shame, but the genie is out of the bottle. I predicted several years ago that spammers were going to kill email marketing. Now I have had to face the fact that unethical marketers will accelerate the demise of commercial email. I'd like to be wrong, but I'm not. If you are in the business of distributing information (and who among us isn't?), now would be a good time to be sure that you are offering an RSS subscription option. Just a short way down the road you'll be glad you did.
