‘Worldwide Brands’ has released their latest ‘Product Sourcing Newsletter’, complete with product sourcing tips for home-based e-tailers, upcoming trade shows, and spotlighted eCommerce wholesalers. The featured article is titled “Protecting Yourself From Spam Can Hurt Your Business”.

Protecting Yourself From Spam Can Hurt Your Business

By: Chris Malta, CEO WorldwideBrands.com

Nobody wants spam or junk mail, but Anti-Spam programs go TOO far, and filter out legitimate business information that you may be waiting for.

Nobody likes Junk Mail.

I certainly don’t, and I probably delete upwards of 150 spam and junk emails from my inbox every day. As much as I detest the lame weasel-people who will do almost anything to get a piece of Spam into my Inbox, I do NOT use an Anti-Spam Program.

Anti-Spam Programs are designed to look for certain words, phrases, and other content that statistics show will usually appear in Junk Email. Then they either filter that email out before it even gets to your Inbox, or they automatically label it as SPAM when it does reach your Inbox, which often causes you to delete the email before you even look at it.

Well, that’s a wonderful concept, but it’s not very practical. Many of those words and phrases are also used in perfectly legitimate email communications that you may be expecting, and even waiting for.

In fact, these days, I would not be surprised if almost as much legitimate email was stripped from your Inbox as is Spam. Why? Because the Spammers test their own Spam Email against Anti-Spam Programs before they even send it out!

Have you noticed lately that most Spam email has become a collection of unrelated words and disjointed phrases, with only a few words that actually relate to what the Spammers actually want you to see?

For example, I get a Emails like this all the time now:

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Elucidate cosmology reheat suet mode wend burro neb from strength pickles undertone university Cheap whereby dehorn knot doors heaps news aprons grow come pro-rata pricing riotous leg ones whey nod friend on aligning table vertex lapidary envoy shirked edicts fossil unfits Viagra jeer oven reposed neigh for knee mows felt toes tidy Here.

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That isn’t an actual Email. I wrote it myself purely as an example for this article, in about five minutes. I know that this email will pass Anti-Spam software! I created it in HTML format and then I tested it against a very popular Anti-Spam Program.

It passed with flying colors!

Yet, it IS Spam. It’s the most common kind of Spam now and there’s nothing that all these Anti-Spam Programs can do about it. That’s because it’s created purposely by the Spammers to pass Anti-Spam software. That is NOT hard to do, and the Spammers know that. So, people buy into the idea of all this wonderful Anti-Spam protection, and the Spammers simply change the content of the Spams, test them against the very Anti-Spam Programs that are supposed to protect you, and refine them until they get through to you anyway. As I said, it took me no more than five minutes to do that with the example message above.

Sometimes even entire Internet Service Provider companies, the ones who you pay to connect you to the Internet, place Anti-Spam software on the Email Servers that deliver your Email to you! That has the effect of labeling Email in your Inbox as Spam before it even gets to your Inbox, thereby encouraging you to delete it before you even look at it. Sometimes Email that doesn’t pass the Service Providers’ Anti-Spam software is even deleted by your Internet Service Provider, and you never even know it was sent to you! That smacks of Censorship, but let’s not even go there in this article.

Okay, so why is this all a BAD thing?

Here’s the thing. When legitimate companies that you may do business with, or need information from, try to send you email containing business or product information that you want and need, THAT email has a strong chance of being labeled and/or pre-deleted as Spam also. In fact, these days, it has a better chance of being labeled as Spam than actual Spam does, because it’s so easy for actual Spammers to work around the Anti-Spam Programs.

The developers of the Anti-Spam Programs are working so fast to include so many words and phrases and types of email headers and other things into their Anti-Spam Suspect Criteria that they are stopping you from getting real email that you actually need to get from legitimate sources. It’s overkill, like killing a flea by shooting a cannon at your dog.

Here are some examples from my own company’s experience:

We sell Informational products on the Internet. We do NOT spam, ever. WE follow the rules of Business Emailing. Most of our sales come from referrals by other web sites, or people who find us in the Search Engines.

When our automated Order System sends out Order Receipts that contain information about what people bought from us, those Order Receipts are many times treated as Spam by these Anti-Spam Programs. When we test our perfectly legitimate Order Receipt email against a popular Anti-Spam Program, it tells us that our legitimate Order Receipt email has a better chance at being recognized as Spam than the example of actual Spam that I wrote earlier in this article!

That means that when you or your Internet Service Provider use Anti-Spam software, many times you have a better chance at getting actual Spam than you have of getting a legitimate receipt from a company you purchased something from!

So, why don’t we re-write our Order Receipt so that it passes the Anti-Spam Software better? Because if we did that effectively, it would end up looking like the pure gibberish in my example above.

There are other ways to protect yourself against Spam, and they have problems too.

Many people have bought into these Anti-Spam Services. Here’s what happens there:

If an Anti-Spam Service thinks an email is Spam, it sends an Email back to the Sender of the Email in question. Then the Sender of the email has to click on a link in that reply, go to a web page, enter a code that is given on the page, and that allows emails from the Sender to go through to the addressee in the future.

That’s a nice concept, too, but it’s not practical for most business Emails. Here’s why:

In both the businesses I am an owner of, we regularly send out Customer Updates to our legitimate customers. These are perfectly legal customer updates according to the CAN-SPAM Act. Sometimes these updates let people know of new services or products we have available that will help their businesses. Sometimes they tell people something critical about an update or an addition to a product they already own.

Every time we send out a Customer Update Email, we send out tens of thousands of them, because we have tens of thousands of Customers.

And, every time we do that, we get thousands upon thousands of automated replies telling us we need to click on a link, go to a web page, enter a secret code, and click “Submit” in order to get our legitimate email through to an existing customer.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that we send out tens of thousands of Customer Update Emails, and we get 5,000 Email replies like that, from people using Anti-Spam Services. Let’s also say that it takes only about three minutes to sort out one of those emails, and follow that “approval” process. It would take us 250 hours to comply with all those requests from people using Anti-Spam Services. We would have to dedicate an employee to do nothing but that, once every three minutes, all day long, for over six weeks!

Obviously we’re not going to do that, so unfortunately there are thousands of our legitimate customers who completely miss out on updates they need, and Newsletters they want, that could affect the success of their businesses.

Other companies, small and large, face the same problems outlined in this article.

Here’s the upshot of all this:

Because of Anti-Spam Programs and Anti-Spam Services, YOU end up missing an unknown number of legitimate, important Emails from legitimate businesses that need to contact you for one reason or another. You also miss Emails that you have requested, from Newsletters you want to read, for example.

Now, I’m not here to trash Anti-Spam Programs. They do TRY to address an important issue. The problem is that you can’t replace the decision-making power of a human brain with a computer program, no matter how hard you try. There will always be “overkill errors”. When you’re in business on the Internet, you can’t afford to be a victim of those errors.

So, what’s the solution?

It’s really pretty simple.

Use Two Email Addresses, one for Personal Email and one for Business Email!

You can still use Anti-Spam Programs and Services on your Personal Email Address. Just get yourself another Email Address for your Business purposes, and do not use Anti-Spam protection on the Business Email Address. Yes, you’ll have to delete Spam messages, but that’s really not such a big deal in the grand scheme of things, folks. I do it all the time, it’s not all that terrible, and I don’t miss important Business Email because someone else’s software decides I don’t need to see it.

Just remember, when you start using a Business Email address for this purpose, make sure you always use it for only your business correspondence and for business products you order online. That makes sorting out the Spam you do get much easier, because you’ll always have a general idea from whom you want to receive Email.

Product Sourcing Newsletter

* IMNewswatch would like to thank Worldwide Brands for granting permission to reprint this newsletter article.

Before purchasing with you, buyers must perceive that your business is legitimate and real. But establishing customer relations takes time. And if they don’t feel comfortable buying from you, you’ll never get a chance to develop those relationships in the first place!

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