Alice

My colleague Andrew received a business card  from an attendee at Ladies That Lunch so he could put his details on the newsletter mailing list.

This is a very acceptable way of increasing your newsletter mailing list, adding on business cards willingly given is a form of permission. It is an alternative to the opt-in provision.

The trouble was, there was no email address, and the mailing list consists of email addresses. There was a website address, but further investigation showed the content page didn’t provide the necessary piece of information either, consisting only of a contact form.

Obviously this particular client had suffered from spam in the past, so by eliminating any chance of internet robots using his email link to bombard his in-box had prevented prospective clients from finding it and using it for real reasons.

Spam is a problem (in fact the CIM defines spam as malicious software that sends viruses to your computer, whereas unwanted emails should really be termed viral marketing used for the wrong reasons), but you can overcome this by using the words ’email me/John/us’ or whatever and using those words as a contextual link with the email address behind it.

Remember, this problem is exasperated only by robots, not necessarily humans, and we still should maintain the upper hand!