Great post by Kara Stringer on Recruiting Blogs titled Mass Mailing and Spam. Job seekers should write monthly newsletters to their friends and family (and professional acquaintances) letting them know what they are up to in their job search. I wrote two posts on how to write a job search newsletter… in this post I wanted to talk about what Kara brings up.
Kara talks about some stuff you don’t hear about often. In my “Effective Email Communication” video series I talk about a number of these things, and more (focusing on a human reader). Kara talks about the nasty world of email spam.
I used to be an email administrator, many years ago. I’ll tell you a few things:
- We aren’t going to win the war against spam, no matter what we do. The more we block, the more “false positives” are going to get blocked.
- If you email people, especially a lot of people, you will somehow get flagged as a spammer.
- Even people who agree to get your emails will flag you as a spammer. I’ve had this happen with JibberJobber users.
- Email server admins, whether they are people or just the server rules, are quite unforgiving.
- Spam blacklist owners are very, very powerful, many times just one person who does it part-time, and can be either slow to fix their error (whitelist you), or completely unforgiving, tagging you as a spammer for a long time.
What do you do to prevent being flagged as a spammer?
Write better emails.
And follow some of Kara’s guidelines. If you are interested in writing BETTER emails that have a better chance of being read and responded to, check out my series called Effective Email Communication.