I am absolutely ruthless with dealing with spam. If I get added to a mailing list without my permission, I’ll unsubscribe immediately. If the survey gives me the option to click the button for “I never signed up for this” or “report this as abuse”, there is a 100% chance I’m clicking it.
If I’m not provided with a mechanism to unsubscribe, I’ll just report it as junk. I’m not spending one second replying “unsubscribe” or “I love kittens” or whatever cute phrase they think is going to start a conversation – because I don’t want a conversation. I want the spam to stop.
Report as Junk. Done. Tomorrow it’ll show up in my quarantine report and I never have to see the crap hit my inbox again. It’s beautiful.
And I know I must sound like a real grump, but the reality is this: I don’t want to spend time reading or triaging spam messages. I’d much rather dedicate that time to helping my clients succeed. I routinely have about 10,000-15,000 messages in my deleted items folder from the past ~30 days so every one message that I must deal with adds up to an appreciable amount of time. Assuming I had to delete those 10,000 messages by hand and each one takes a mere two second to process (which is probably fast). That’s 5 hours, 33 minutes, and 20 seconds of my life spent dealing with spam. Every month. So, every mailing list I can get removed from is a huge win for me.
Spam Messages Per Month
Hours Dealing with Spam Per Month
Today I got a particularly annoying form of spam that came via Google Groups. If you’re curious how I tracked this mess down and finally got myself unsubscribed, you can read the technical deep dive here. And if you want to run email campaigns the right way so that your audience actually wants to hear from you and your messages avoid spam folders, we can help with that too.
0 Comments