Imagine you walked into Target and they padded you down because they
had experienced a rash of hold ups lately and they just wanted to make sure that you weren’t carrying a weapon? Once you straightened out your rumpled clothing would you continue shopping there?

Recently a client requested some programming work. I replied to their email and received a form letter (email) telling me that the client was experiencing a lot of spam and that I needed to hit "reply" to this email to ensure that I wasn’t a spammer.

No, there wasn’t the humiliation of a public pat down, but I wasn’t exactly "feeling the love," either.

You’ve probably received a similar email once or twice (or a thousand times) if you spend a lot of time on the Web. It’s the "spam filter method" used by companies like SpamArrest and Spam Lion. It should be considered a "prospect filter."

Spam is an unfortunate part of life online and there are a number of ways to deal with it. It can be time consuming and frustrating to wade through dozens of offers for lower mortgages or Brazilian porn just to get to your "real" emails.

However, we need to be very careful how we treat our clients and prospects when we come up with a plan to deal with these annoyances. Incoming emails should not be dealt with using a "shoot first and ask questions later" mentality. Find an email filter solution that doesn’t put the burden of proof on your prospects and clients.

It can be difficult enough to get new business; we shouldn’t set up additional barriers to keep our customers away.

Rich Brooks
Innocent Until Proven Guilty

Tags: Spam | Email Filters | Spam Lion | SpamArrest