Guarding my email address has become a fulltime job

There are two things that tick me off: telemarketing phone calls and email from businesses that think I want to do business with them. I recently put out a news release via one of the major news distribution. The release got me two to three emails from qualified journalists, but the price of reaching them meant that my email address box was filled with scat from vendors selling everything that had a security or technology connection.

One wrote me that his product had been featured in national security publications, but I found that his firm had engaged the services of one of the wire distribution services. Naturally, major web sites like Yahoo picked the story up, and this guy was telling me that these major news organizations had endorsed their product. Truthfully, search engine news sites like Yahoo pick up every story from folks like Business Wire or Profnet.

I wrote this person back to tell him that I wasn't interested and that he could do a better job of reaching qualified customers. I got a terse answer saying that he would drop my name off his distribution list. However, this same yahoo also contacted me after another client engaged me to use my favorite news service.

I am writing this post as a grassroots campaign to declare an unofficial war on these email marketing bozos. If more of us would take a few minutes to either write an email message back to these firms instead of reporting it as spam, perhaps it would make my inbox not as filled with their crap.