Every day, our Inboxes get clogged up by spam email. Most of it is unsolicited. Someone or some company somewhere has sold your email address to a third party who then proceeds to send you offers you’re not interested in.
If you have your email address on your website in text format, it can also be scraped into a large database which is then used to send emails you’d rather others not see in you Inbox if they look over your shoulder – emails for adult products and services.
This is why it’s a good idea, if you’re going to put your naked email address on your site, you should use an image of your email address rather than regular text. The contents of an image can’t be scraped.
The other solution to protecting your email address is to add a contact form to your site which doesn’t show your email address publicly.
Another source of spam email comes from some of the various mailing lists you sign up to. Responsible email list owners will treat their subscribers with respect and send them quality information that has real value.
Irresponsible list owners will think that, now that you’re on their list, they have carte blanche to send you any old tat they think might generate them some income.
Most of us simply delete those unsolicited and unwanted spam emails. But have you ever been tempted to respond to one, not to buy into something, but to see what reaction you get from the sender when you engage with them?
That’s exactly what James Veitch did. And he talks about his experiences in these TED videos.
I just couldn’t stop laughing when I was watching them.
Now the interesting thing to note is, these videos have had over 37 million views!!!
Now that is some serious traffic!!! Think how big a mailing list he could build with that! 🙂
If you are going to build an email list, please don’t be a spammer.
All the best,
Gary Nugent
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P.S.: Don't forget, if you want to create an internet income of your own, here's one of my recommended ways to do that:
Hi Gary,
You make some great points. I get so much spam now that I don’t even take the time to open the email and click unsubscribe because it is faster to just delete it! I like the idea of submitting a picture of my email address instead of the text format, I had never thought of doing that before!
One of my Gmail accounts is full of spam that I can’t keep up with, Mollie. That’s the result of not being able to unsubscribe from some lists. It should be easy but sometimes it’s not. I liked that James Veitch dealt with that topic in his third video.
Hi, that was really fun.
I think I’ll want to reply to spam emails too in future 🙂
But thanks for the tip, placing my email address in a picture format, I haven’t done that yet.
Maybe I get 37 million spam emails, can I monetize that too lol
See you. Stefan 🙂
I heard a story that someone else responded to one of those Nigerian emails that asks for your help in transferring money out of the country. After several emails, he managed to get the Nigerian to send him money first! A complete reversal of the scam! 🙂
I really hate spam. I try to delete every single one of them but some times it becomes frustrating. I guess we have to learn live with that as internet is not all good and bright.
Nevertheless these videos are really fun to watch!
Some spam always makes its way into your inbox. Have you tried using filters in your email software to automatically send spam to the trash folder?
Thanks for that Gary, it gave me a laugh.
I had seen this before, but it was great to see it again. Solomon sounds like a great person to have some fun with! Have you ever had a Solomon send you 50 kg of gold for no reason?
I wish! A 1kg bar of gold is worth $42,940.53. Fifty of them would be worth $2,147,026.5. Transporting it and security might be a problem though! 🙂