Are You a Spammer?

When you think of spam, you probably think of the unwanted ads for mortgages, stocks, and pharmaceuticals that fill your inbox — not newsletters and emails about worthy causes from nonprofits like you, right?

Yet as anyone who has signed up for nonprofit newsletters, listserv, or updates knows, even emails from Mother Teresa can start to look a lot like Cialis ads when you are no longer interested in reading them.

A while back, I joined a mailing list for a nonprofit. It didn't take me long to realize that the half-dozen emails I was receiving from it daily were too much to read. Initially, I absent-mindedly deleted them; when this became a nuisance, I tried unsubscribing to the list, to no avail. Finally, I was forced to add the organization to my spam filter.

Today, this organization is the number-one spammer in my junk mail folder, but it's not the only one. I'll confess that I had to mark a persistent Buddhist temple as spam too when I couldn't figure out how to unsubscribe from its mailing list. Then there is the grey area of newsletters I subscribe to but don't always have time to read.

This is in a way hard to admit because TechSoup sends out its own weekly newsletter, and I know that not everyone who subscribes to it reads every issue. If you send out email campaigns, newsletters, announcements, or listserv items, chances are that someone on your list will eventually consider you a spammer; likewise, anything you willingly sign up for has the potential to become spam if you don't want to read it and can't unsubscribe.

What to do then? TechSoup's article Wait, That Newsletter's Not Spam! offers tips for keeping your messages out of constituents' junk filters — and complying with the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act, which outlines guidelines for organizations that send out mass emails.

If you send out a newsletter, make sure you make it easy for people to unsubscribe. Likewise, before signing up for a new listserv or newsletter, double-check that you can remove yourself from fairly easily. Always read an organization's privacy policy before providing your email, and if you have any doubts, consider instead signing up for that organization's RSS feed, which is easier to "turn off."

What about all those newsletters that you don't want to give up entirely but don't always read? Consider filtering them to individual folders. This way, they won't clog up your inbox, but they'll be easy to find and browse when you want.

In honor of TechSoup's fifth annual Stop Spam Today campaign and special Mailshell Promotion, we'll be blogging about spam topics through December 5. Check back weekly for new spam-related posts.

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