Jim Daniels

Help for Victims

Now lets move on to help some spam victims. If you're doingbusiness online, there is a good chance that one day youwill be accused of spamming, even if you are not a spammer.The anonymity of the Internet promotes the attitude ofaccuse first and get the facts later. (I know this all toowell after my recent experience.)

Anyway, when it happens to you, you'll need some letters tosend out to both the spam victims and the companyresponsible for the spam. Here are the two you should savefor future reference...

Letter to spam recipients:

Thank you for contacting us. Here are the details of thisunfortunate situation.

The spam you received originated from the domain. Rest assured you have NOT been addedto any email lists at our site. We do NOT use nor do wecondone the use of unsolicited bulk email and we too, areinnocent bystanders in this situation.

We are in no way affiliated with the offending website andalong with your address, our addresses were on their spamlist. Any further actions you wish to take should bedirected to them. More details on our policies and thisincident are available at the following URL:

And here's a letter you can use as a model when you need tocontact the party responsible for your grief...

Dear Offending Website Owner Name,CC to:legal@yourdomain.com

I have copied the headers of an email message sent by youruser, which confirms email activity on . Thisemail has resulted in numerous complains to our emailaddresses. Please take the following actionsimmediately:

a) explain of how this incident took place and whyb) take measures to insure that this NEVER happens againc) notify each address on your list that our domain was notresponsible and was an innocent bystander in thisunfortunate situation

Please reply to this email message before the close ofbusiness on or we will be forced topursue further action. We will also expect a full letter ofexplanation mailed or faxed to our offices.

Thank you for your cooperation.

And closing today's column, here are a few additional tipsto help you avoid trouble with unsolicited email...

- If you have an opt-in list, keep EVERY opt-in request youever receive. I keep opt-in requests dating back years. Onseveral occasions I have been able to provide proof ofsignup to someone who forgot they joined and accused me ofsending unsolicited email. These email "receipts" also comein handy with ISPs and web hosts.

- Keep your email addresses from being harvested at yourwebsite by using a tool that encodes your email addresses.It's a great way to cut down on spam and avoid situationslike the one I ran into! See the following URL for a freeencoding service: www.siteup.com/encoder.html

- At your site, state your policy on unsolicited email veryclearly. It's also a good idea to post reports of anyincidents at the same area of your site. See http://www.bizweb2000.com/privacy.htm for an example of howyou can set this up.

Well, this closes a rare, not-so-fun chapter in onlinemarketing. Hopefully today's tip will help you avoid troubleor save you a bit of time if and when troubledoes arrive.

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