Sometimes when I write these newsletters I’m not sure if what I’m writing is relevant to everyone who reads it. For example, if I write about researching your family history online, using a touchscreen tablet PC or editing digital photos.
But this time, I’m pretty sure that if you use email, this is relevant…
The ins and outs of spam email
Spam email, as you probably know, is junk email – emails sent by people who don’t know you and that you haven’t asked for.
The people sending it are generally either trying to get you to buy something dodgy or out and out scammers, after your bank or credit card details.
It’s not the same as genuine companies sending you emails after you’ve bought something from them – even if you don’t really want emails from them. And there’s one big difference:
With emails from a genuine company, if you don’t want them, the best thing to do is to click on the link in that email saying something like “unsubscribe” or “Don’t want to get emails from us? Click here”.
Then you won’t get any more emails from them – simple as that. You really won’t – if they ignored your request, they’d quickly find none of their emails at all were delivered as email companies are very careful about this kind of thing.
But spammers are different. The last thing you should do with spam email is click on an unsubscribe link. It probably wouldn’t unsubscribe but even worse, it tells the spammers that you’ve read the email – so they’ll send you even more!
So if you get emails you don’t want from a genuine company, perhaps because you’ve bought something from them in the past, click on the unsubscribe link. But please don’t click on the “junk email” or “Spam” button in your email program (assuming you have one – most do nowadays).
When you click that it counts against the company and makes it harder for their genuine emails to get through. For example if you were to do it to this email (please don’t!) then other people who really want these emails would be less likely to get them as the email companies might think I was a spammer.
When do you use the “spam” or “junk email” buttons? Whenever an email really is spam – it’s not from a company you’ve ever had any dealings with and usually it’s trying to con you. Then by all means click on the button – and with any luck you’ll be less likely to get any more emails from that particular spammer… and so will everyone else.
Prize draw winner
If you remember, everyone who ordered the new videos by the 2nd April was entered into a prize draw to win a Nexus 7 Touchscreen tablet. Alastair helped pick the winner out of the hat (well, box), though he seemed a bit camera-shy:http://youtu.be/alkX7Ql-7eM
If you did order the videos and weren’t the winner, well, at least if you ordered by then you did get the free book!
If you haven’t ordered the videos, you can still get the free book – out of 1000 we now have 282 left. But next week we’re going to start advertising them to the general public and then I’m sure they’ll go in no time. So if you’re at all interested best read more and decide to get the free trial now.