Whenever people talk about email marketing you are bound to hear the word SPAM, this is when your mind might start to wonder back to old school dinners with spam fritters or spam sandwiches but the spam we are talking about is far worse than that! It is the scourge or real email marketers; email spam is the unsolicited and often random emails that everyone gets bombarded with on a daily basis.

Email spam comes in several different shapes and forms from businesses looking to get you to sign up for things right the way through to emails selling Viagra and all of those other inappropriate things.

So what exactly is Spam?

Email Spam is also known as Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE) or Junk Mail. Spam email today is increasingly being sent from what’s known as “Zombie Networks” which are often personal computers that have been infected with viruses or worms that allow spammers to access the computers through a backdoor and use their address book/mailing list to get their message out.

There is a whole industry that has cropped up with “server farms” sending billions of emails each day to sets of random characters which happen upon your email address and again pass on/sell your details to other spammers who will bombard you with more emails and again pass on/sell your details. It’s a never ending cycle.

Another form of spam is Unsolicited Commercial Email also known as UCE. Now this type of spam normally comes from genuine companies who have purchased data from list companies who say that it is ok to communicate with you when in fact no permission has been given. This often leads those companies to be blacklisted.

How can I communicate with people without being classed as a spammer?

That’s quite simple, the first set to communicating with someone is asking permission! 9 times out of 10 people are happy to give you their details and their permission to communicate with them when prompted. For instance if you have a website then you can have a “Sign up for our newsletter” box which then has a tick box asking people to tick it if they agree to be communicated with.

It really is that simple!

So if you want to avoid being called a spammer……get permission!