Would you email out your home address to complete strangers? No? Okay, how about your friend's and/or family's home addresses?
Treat your email address info in a manner similar to your home address info. Do you want people stalking you at your home? Well in the same way, when you give out other people's email addresses, spammers and other bad people will stalk you.
One might say, "I dont give out other peoples' email addresses." Well...have you ever emailed a bunch of people and put all of their email addresses in the TO: field? If so, then yes you have done it. Everyone reading that email can see all the email addresses in plain view. One might then say, "Are you telling me I cant use the TO: field when sending to multiple email addresses?" YES...and sometimes no.
Check out the following scenario:
- You want to send out a deal or coupon to a bunch of people. The people you want to send to are a mixture of friends, family, coworkers, etc. And they all do not know each other. What do you do?
A. Put all of the email addresses in the TO: field. That way, your coworkers can see your auntie's and uncle's email addresses and vice versa. Also, when one of the persons on the email list does a "reply to all", everyone gets to see his/her response. Yay, now we can have a whole discussion on the deal with strangers. Instead of getting that one single email, now we have listen to everyone's responses and there is no way to stop it. Also, one of your coworkers decides that this is such a good deal, that Im going to FOWARD the email to his/her other coworkers, friends, and family. Wohoo. Now everyone's email addresses are being sent to more total strangers because when you foward an email that have email addresses in the TO: field, those email addresses are completely visible in the body of the email.
B. Put all of the email address in the BCC: field. That way, all email addresses are hidden and when people reply, the response will only be sent to the original sender. Since the content of the email is treated more like an FYI rather than an actual discussion.
Hopefully, you would choose B. So when is it appropriate to place multiple email address in the TO: field? It's appropriate when you actually want to start or have a discussion amongst everyone on that list whether it be planning an outting together or discussing last night's episode of 24. Hopefully, everyone on that list knows each other and are of the same group type. ie. Friends, Family, Coworkers.
Now this brings me to mailing lists which is one of the major culprits. You create this massive list of 100 emails and save it as a group email list. You email this list weekly to give updates on your rantings or whatever topic. Here are my suggestions.
- Respect and protect peoples' email address info. Therefore, when you send out your emails, please do not put their email addresses in the TO: field. Use the BCC: field.
- Realize that you have assumed that they would like your weekly update emails. Im sure 99% of the people you send it to probably dont mind your emails. However, there could be that 1% like me who would prefer not to receive or read the emails. Then I would be forced to either manually delete your email every week or create a filter that automatically moves your email to the trash can. Whoa, that sounds harsh. Sorry, but I dont want to deal with more work than I have to when reading email. I have enough work reading other unwanted email or dealing with spam. Actually, surprisingly, I dont get much spam especially when using gmail. But that's another discussion. Anyways, its similar to signing up for an account on a shopping website. When I sign up, I always uncheck the "sign up for our newsletter" checkbox. But there are some sites, that dont have this and automatically sign you up for their newsletter and such. Therefore, just because you are signing up for an account, they assume that you want their newsletter. Bad boy! You've heard of the saying "Every man is assumed innocent until proven guilty." Now I'd like my saying heard "Every man is assumed opted out until he opts in." You hear that spammers? You hear that junk mail? You hear that telemarketers? You hear that shopping web sites? Dont send me anything, unless I have requested it. I dont give you permission to send me stuff.
Sorry for digressing. Back to mailing lists. I am not blaming you guys for anything because no one has ever told you or taught you how you should use mailing lists. And apprarently there arent any mailing list managing websites out there. I just did a google search and there isnt much out there except for coollist.com. I havent tried it and it looks like its currently not even working. Hmmm...Maybe I should create one?
So I guess I dont really have a solution yet when it comes setting up an easy mailing list. Since I have website hosting, they usually have mailing list managers, but they are not that simple to set up. But in theory, let me explain how mailing lists should work.
Add all of the people you want onto a mailing list that you create. Yes, in otherwords, subscribe them to the mailing list without even telling them. Dont worry, it should be okay, since its a gesture that you are just inviting them to this mailing list knowing that they can always opt out. No harm done. When subscribing them, members should receive a message detailing why you are adding them and include a link to unsubscribe to the list. You are really suppose to let them subscribe to it themselves, but its really hard to get people to opt into things. The most important part is the ease and the anonymity of opting out. People dont want to hurt your feelings by sending you an email that says, "Please remove me from this mailing list." So all of the emails that are sent to the mailing list should have a remove me link on the bottom of the message.
As I was finishing up writing this post, I ran into this interesting article on email. Notice how it reconfirms what I said above. Cool!
