Free Spam Blockers

Is Email Marketing Dead?

Free spam blockers have become a huge priority in my business lately, and for most other online entrepreneurs. One wonders with the spam problem growing ever so quickly ... is e-mail dead?

I won't attempt to answer such a big question here, but from my own horrible journey with spam and free spam blockers, I have discovered that there is hope!

Not only are there some some nifty tips and tools that may help you, but also there are some new and emerging paradigms that go way beyond simply getting stronger or better free spam blockers... towards a revolution in online communications.

Free spam blockers have become almost mandatory for anyone receiving e-mail these days. For me, spam became a huge nightmare since 2001 when I created HomeBizWomen.com. My e-mail was spammed SO severely ... so much so that free spam blockers (or even PAID ones) didn't make a dent. At one point I even considered getting rid of my websites because I was so fed up!!

I just couldn't deal with the thousands of junk mail that were sent to my website domains. At last count I was getting 5,000 spam a day. The free spam blockers I had been using were not at all effective!

Once the free spam blockers became obsolete in the face of my growing spam nightmare, I then moved on to the paid spam blockers. I've tried a bunch of them.

The Outlook spam blockers didn't work at all. Spamkiller from MacAfee was too buggy and kept crashing my e-mail program. MailwasherPro spam blocker only caught 25% of the spam and took too long to use. I considered dumping my Outlook 2002 e-mail program in favor of Eudora, but couldn't figure out how to make Eudora work! I'm really not technically inclined, and it simply wasn't intuitive enough for me. Now you're seeing how REALLY un-technically oriented I am! :-) It just goes to show you, you don't need to be an internet whiz to create a profitable website!

Anyways, back to my free spam blockers tale of woe. For a while I forwarded my mail to Yahoo spam blockers which worked a little but I still needed a second level of spam blocker in Outlook. I discovered iHateSpam which worked OK for small amounts of spam but got miserably clogged when I reached the 500 spam a day mark. :(

I looked at dozens more paid and free spam blockers, with nothing good to report. Finally, a fellow webmaster recommended Fastmail , which is not a spam service but comes with free spam blockers included in their service. Surprisingly they had several features that were able to help me when so many other spam software couldn't.

Instead of overburdening my Outlook e-mail program, Fastmail goes out to my poor, spam ridden e-mail accounts BEFORE they get to my Outlook e-mail program.

Fastmail then downloads the e-mail, filters it with an excellent and very effective spam blocker, and now my Outlook program is transformed from an out of control, nightmare producing monster into a quiet, tame, friendly business assistant!! :-)

Instead of 5,000 spam a day I am now getting 30 ... which my iHateSpam spam software takes care of. After what I've been through, this is a dream come true!

Best of all, the Fastmail webmasters are willing to help out whenever the spam starts getting out of control. I use their paid service which is $20 a year, which has been well worth it!

Listen and learn ... don't end up like me! The few mistakes I made, giving my e-mail address to supposedly legitimate newsletter publishers, and having my e-mail address up on my site, have cost me hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of hours of time. The free spam blockers, or the paid ones, were no match for the automated spam bots which harvest your e-mail address from your website.

First and foremost, NEVER post your e-mail on your website. There are three options that will preserve your ability for your website visitors to contact you.

• Use a "contact us" form (for example this one . You will be notified of your contacts via e-mail, so be SURE that your paid or free spam blockers do not block your website form's e-mail!
• Code your e-mail to prevent spammers from harvesting your addresss.
• If neither of these options works for you, at the very least, make your email a NON clickable link like this: yourname@yourdomain.com

Do you use email or a newsletter in your business? Here is a great tool that will help your mail get to your subscribers, rather than dumped into the spam blocker!

While spam is the fundamental root of our problems, the anti-spam measures and free spam blockers that large ISPs and important free e-mail hosts (like Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail) undertake are what hurts legitimate internet marketers.

Much like tuna nets catch dolphins by mistake, their spam filters and spam blockers catch us. I've found a nifty free Spam Check Tool that is a quick way for honest marketers to make sure that their e-mails are less likely to be considered spam by ISPs, by Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail (which tosses you into their Junk spam blocker folders) and even by individual spam filters set up by an ever-growing number of recipients around the world. It's so simple and only takes a minute.

Here's how it works...

STEP 1: Copy-and-paste your subject of your e-mail, but start your subject with the word "TEST" (without the quotes, in UPPER CASE) so that we know this is a test e-mail. (If the subject does NOT start with TEST, we'll assume it's REAL spam and delete it). Here's a sample subject...

TESTFlower-Lovers Ezine #007: Peonies for the Yukon

STEP 2: Copy-and-paste the rest of your email or ezine and simply send it, exactly the way you would send it to your recipient, to...
spamcheck-ebiz3505@sitesell.net

You'll get a report back (in seconds, perhaps a few minutes if volume is heavy) telling you how good or bad your e-mail is, from a spam-detector's point of view. You will receive a full, free spam report of all corrections that you should make to your ezine or e-mail message, in order to stay out of the spam junk folders. It does NOT, of course, actually comment on WHAT you write -- first, it's not that smart. And second, the actual content is YOUR business! ;-)

And remember, this free Spam Checker is just one feature of the E-zine MailOut tool, which itself is merely one part of the entire system of Site Build It! tools... guaranteed to make any small business succeed online... in a tenth of the time ... at a tenth of price. ( I used Site Build It to build THIS site! ) For more information about Site Build It!, please see these Results.

If you've been doing business on the net for a while now, you probably publish a newsletter ... and you've probably seen your response rates go down significantly in the last years. Why? Those wonderful free spam blockers that keep our inbox so clean, also filter out our wanted emails.

And, as spam has increased, people are over-saturated with email and they pay less attention.

There is a growing trend now towards alternative ways of staying in touch with potential clients. Some of these solutions are even opening up new paradigms of communication for the web.

I just recently learned of something that I believe will revolutionize online communications. It's wave of the future, and it's called ... RSS! If you're tired of the hassles of trying to publish a newsletter with all the problems of email marketing and free spam blockers, think about creating an RSS Feed. This new technology which provides some exciting new options for newsletter publishers. At one point I had almost 20,000 newsletter subscribers, but the response rates began plummeting because subscribers were having trouble getting my email. Those free spam blockers get a little TOO overzealous at times.

Imagine instead of fighting the free spam blockers, that your subscribers visit your RSS feed and can see every time when you've updated your website or published a newsletter or blog entry.

Imagine that instead of your spam blockers deleting their emails to you, that they are able to respond to you instantly on your RSS feed by leaving a comment, without their response getting gobbled up by the free spam blockers.

Imagine your readers getting to see what other readers are saying. Imagine your newsletter getting found by the search engines, and your advertisers getting their ads seen not once but over and over again!

Imagine hundreds or even thousands of new visitors to your site, all because they found your newsletter! I like this new wave of the future because we no longer need to worry about the free spam blockers gobbling up our legitimate newsletters.

There is one other, obvious solution to using e-mail marketing responsibly ... chose an autoresponder service that is not blocked by most free spam blockers. Test drive the internet's first and most reliable autoresponder service, which manages to deliver more opt-in e-mail than most other autoresponder services out there.

• For more tips on how to stop spam, see our article Spam: Where it Came From, and How to Escape It