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:

• Yahoo Groups
  
• Topica

These lists have been around for a while. We use both of them and have found them dependable. 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 do. 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 most. Remember, some of us belong to 100 or more lists. We 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 will 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. (Though, we still prefer our own opt-in list)

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 account. Use it when signing up to the lists. Then, filter out the spam you get in reply.