We hear this same thing about twice per month. Important leads received over the website were missed or responded to late because the email went to a spam folder. Are your community liaisons allowing an algorithm to throw leads in the trash? If you’ve ever said, “Oh, it went to spam,” you are probably missing important business opportunities periodically. At Brazzell Marketing Agency, we have a policy prohibiting all employees from using automatic spam filters. The policy helps our business, and it works great. We recommend the same policy for all our clients. Here are a couple of procedures that make it easier to delete automatic spam filtering.

Use Corporate Email Addresses

Your company email address such as contact@myhomecareagency.com will receive less spam than mycompany@comcast.net. Spammers go to major email providers such as Comcast and make up email addresses to spam. Comcast has so many customers, they will occasionally guess right and get some spam through. This practice is less fruitful on your company domain, so spammers don’t try to guess your address there.

Use Defined Spam Filtering Instead of Automatic

Many email programs give you the ability to say which emails go to spam. In Outlook for desktop, right-click on an email. Looking in the “Junk” menu options shows you the ability to mark a particular sender or domain name as spam. After you do this once, that sender will automatically go to spam in the future. In the free email system that comes with your Brazzell website hosting account, cPanel gives you more fine-tuned control. In cPanel (which you can access from RoundCube and Horde with the user menu at the top right), you create an “email filter.” You can then say any email from a certain address or domain gets discarded or put in the junk mail folder. You can also say if the email contains any specific text, it goes automatically to junk.  

Use SHIFT + Click and SHIFT + Delete

When you turn off the automatic spam filtering, your most public email addresses will see more spam in the inbox, but you can get that out of your way quickly if you know the right keystrokes. This works in Roudcube and other email programs. When you have a few pieces of spam together in your inbox, click on the top one to select it. Then hold down the shift button and click on the bottom spam email. Both of them and everything in between will be selected. Then you can delete them all at once. In Roundcube and several other email programs, if you hold down the shift button when pressing delete, the program will completely delete them instead of sending them to the trash folder.

Use BoxTrapper

Your free email system that comes with your Brazzell website hosting account has a BoxTrapper feature. This only allows approved senders access to your inbox. For new, unapproved senders, BoxTrapper puts the emails in a queue and replies to the sender automatically. The sender then follows the instructions in the automatic reply to get their email out of your queue and be added to your list of approved contacts. You don’t have to do anything. Most spammers won’t take the time to respond to a BoxTrapper, but real businesspeople will. However, this feature is not appropriate for your general mailbox such as info@example.com. Using BoxTrapper on leads will cause the lead to just give. On the other hand, BoxTrapper can be useful for personal email accounts of executives who are not fielding leads.

Conclusion

Be aware that most good email programs let you disable automatic spam filtering. With a little practice, you’ll get good at clearing out spam manually while also seizing more business opportunities.