Safe Mail Lists, Or Are They?

As a way to keep from losing dial-up accounts, “Safe Mail" was born. A safe mail list is simply a mailing list comprised of people who have asked to be placed on the list. Safe mail lists can be for anything, but most are for business opportunities, or MLM. Here’s how they work:

1. You start a safe mail list for the subject of your choice. Anyone can join (opt-in) and send & receive messages from & to the other list members.
2. When you join you usually agree to send no more than one message to the group per day. Sometimes this will be limited to once or twice a week.
3. When you join you agree to receive messages from the other group members. In some groups this could be a few messages a week. In others, this could be a few hundred a day.
4. You agree to receive these messages without yelling spam to either the sender or to their ISP. After all, by opting-in, you have asked to receive the messages. And, you may opt-out any time you wish.
5. You also agree to anything else the list-owner may specify as conditions of joining.

So, after you join a list, you may send your message to the list without hearing the word "spam". You will have a special address for sending the e-mail. It is then forwarded to all members of the list. You do not send e-mail to the members directly. Some lists may have a dozen members. Some may have 1000’s.

Most of the old sites are now part of Yahoo! Groups. The newer ones can easily be found by doing a web search. I have in the past used safe lists and find they all have advantages and disadvantages. But, they all have different lists, so don’t limit yourself to one service. After all, all of these are free. One word of warning, because of severe abuse, most of the major mail list services no longer accept groups whose main theme is MLM’s

What do these people do? The same thing we did. Sign up to receive the "digest" version of the list. This way, depending on the host, you receive only a few - or maybe just one mailing a day. Then, when that first mailing comes, we block the sender. This means that our service will send email from the list to the trash can, instead of the inbox. We never see the mailings.

How many people do this? It’s hard to say. But taking a guess, I’d say at least half. With a good probability of more. Remember, some people belong to a 100 or more lists and can’t begin to look at 1000’s of emails each day.

So, does anybody see your mailings in a safe mail list. Yes. The good news is, if you belong to several lists with 100 or more members, lots of people will see your message. If your message goes out to 300, and half or more trash it — there’s still over a hundred who might see your message. It should be noted, our website sees about a 15% increase in traffic the day after we send out a mailing to our safelists. That makes it worth doing.

If you are going to send mail to a lot of lists, be sure you are using a good e-mail client with mail merge capabilities. This way, each mailing can look as though it was sent specifically to that group — not to a list of them. The one we use is Pegasus. This is a freeware program as good as, or better than most you could buy. The web address to get it has changed a few times recently, so just do a search for it.

So, when you sign-up, you will get spam. Just not through the list. Another reason to get that Hotmail or Yahoo! account. Use it when signing up to the lists. Then, filter out the spam you get in reply.