We all hate to get spam in our email inboxes yet it has become standard for most of us.

If you engage in email marketing, you should be aware that different people class different emails as spam.

Personally, if I get an unsolicited email advising me of a service I might not have known about, then I don’t class it as spam – unless it doesn’t have an unsubscribe link on the bottom. Those emails get reported as spam immediately as I have no way of stopping receiving unwanted emails in future. That to me is what spam actually is.

There is a train of thought that any unsolited email is spam, but I don’t necessarily hold with that idea. I would rather someone sent me an email than rang me or wasted paper sending junk mail to me.

To stop your emails being marked as spam, you need to understand your market.
Most owners of personal email addresses don’t want to hear about new services or products as they have been taught to avoid websites and email addresses they don’t trust, so are they really the people you need to target?

There is also the chance that sending emails to your customers will annoy them if you send them too often.

If too many people mark your emails as spam, spam filters will start either delivering all of your company emails to your customers’ spam folder, or mail servers will start blocking all emails from all of your email addresses. It’s a big thing to get wrong, so make sure you understand the implications before you start your email marketing campaigns.

It’s difficult to know what email addresses you should setup when starting your business, so take my advice and avoid using standard email addresses such as sales@ info@ enquiries@ etc.

If you start out using these email addresses, it will be difficult to change them at a later date as people will have these addresses in their address books – and can you be sure you will be able to contact all of your customers to let them know of a change of email address?

So what is so bad about these standard email addresses?

The bottom line is that spammers will guess the first part of the email address and append it to @yourdomainname.com. So, if you are using the standard info@ sales@ enquiries@ webmaster@ accounts@ etc your email address is really easy to guess, and you are likely to receive a deluge of spam.

The same is true of using names for email addresses. Using first names only could see you receiving more spam than using first.last@ or some other variation on that as it makes it harder for a spammer to guess the email addresses.

I would also recommend not having a catchall account – this will capture emails that are sent to non-existant email addresses on your domain. Ask yourself if you really need this? Surely that big order you have been working on will come to your personal email address? As long as your server is setup to bounce email sent to non-existant email addresses, senders will be notified that the email cannot be delivered, and so there is no chance of losing that order.

In a world with increasing spam, can your business afford not to ensure your email server is setup in the best way to combat time wasting spam?