Email is the most important system in any business. Whether you want it or not, the vast majority of us work from our inboxes.

• free email? You are the product and not the customer – you have no control and no voice to complain.
• cheap email? buy cheaply, pay dearly

When email is clogged with spam, not delivering to clients or unreliably syncing email – your email server and it’s foundations are critical.

I cannot stress this enough and regularly help organisation’s out of email black holes.

With the aid of an IT professional – it is surprisingly easy to migrate with little to no downtime!

Thankfully email does not need to be costly, high maintenance or troublesome.

Setting a good foundation by investing in and protecting your own domain (eg freelancegeek.co.uk) with a great email provider:

• Fastmail
• Gmail
• Office365

These are some of my favorites and also systems I use both personally and professionally.

You may even be paying for Office365 and not realising it? (Microsoft Office Business Premium, Business Essentials or Business)

If you happen to be having downtime at the moment – it is a great time to tackle exactly these kind of issues.

Before we can tame the beast we need to understand what it is, where it comes from and how it is generated. Much of it you can control, funnel away or stop, by expending a little energy (and I mean only a little) day to day.

Unsolicited email generally comes from sites that we have signed up to and “of course” we read the Terms & Conditions when we agreed to them.

You know it is unsolicited because it is almost useful (maybe sometimes?) but generally gets a reaction of “I never signed up for that?!?”. Been to a trade show recently? Signed up for a new account?

Unsolicited mail can usually be handled by using the unsubscribe button. Particularly if the email is sent via a reputable email handler eg Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor or Aweber for example.

True spam – obtaining your contact details and contacting you without explicit permission generally comes from:

• other services getting hacked (Facebook, Yahoo, BT to name but a few)
• leaked databases
• the email you display on your website (Robots grabbing it)
• funny/public service announcement chain emails (the chain is valuable)

This is harder to handle as you do not want to hit unsubscribe on this – you only end up confirming the email is accurate and have much more spam!

Adding this to your “junk” folder is a start but won’t cure it. By the way, don’t empty your junk folder too regularly – generally email servers use this to learn from but they aren’t quick.

Don’t perpetuate it yourself, funny emails or forwarding stuff to many is not cool – keep it to WhatsApp.

We’ll tackle how to handle spam and un-cooperative unsolicited email in my other blog posts here on tackling spam

Is spam actually a problem for you or are you simply numb to it?