Although today’s post heading might sound a little like the play title by Oscar Wilde, the resemblance is just a coincidence.
Okay, you caught me. It’s not by accident that the post’s title sounds eerily like Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. I created it on purpose to get your attention.
“What is this post really about?” I hear you ask. Actually, it covers exactly what it says. I want to talk about how important it is for you to check your Junk aka Spam folder in your email. Here’s why:
AOL and Yahoo (perhaps others, too) do this when it comes to Junk/Spam: if an email sits in the Junk folder for a certain period of time (the amount of time varies), they will report the email back to the sender as Spam. Future emails from the same email address will be blocked. When the email is actually junk, this is a good thing. However, let me explain when it’s a bad policy.
Let’s say a legitimate company – Keystone Computer Concepts, for instance – uses a special company to send out their emails – in our case, AWeber. (These types of companies make deals with ISPs that they will control spam/junk from their clients. They promise to lock out a client or drop them altogether if they have excessive spam/junk reports from customers.) When the company wants to communicate with those on its email list, an email campaign is sent to everyone, including you if you’ve subscribed. Normally, the email should show up in your email Inbox. However, sometimes the email, for some unknown reason, goes into the Junk folder instead. (Using KCC as an example, this can happen if you haven’t put our email address on the “white/allow” list.) If you don’t check your Junk/Spam folder (allowing our email to sit there), after a time, your email provider will report our email as junk back to AWeber. That’s a strike against us! If this happens enough times, AWeber would lock our account because it appears we are sending our emails to people who don’t want them.
What should you do? Everyday, you should be going to your Junk/Spam folder and making sure that there are no legitimate emails there. If something is valid and shouldn’t be in that folder, don’t just drag it to the Inbox. Instead, mark it NOT SPAM/JUNK. Most email providers will then automatically move the email to the Inbox.
So that you don’t miss important emails – from us and others – create the habit of checking the Junk/Spam folder every time you check your Inbox or at least once a day.