Spam, Ham, Subject and From – Make it easy on me.

I got an e-mail from Pottery Barn today (don’t ask), with the subject line: “Bring all-natural beauty to the bed”
I knew it was from Pottery Barn because they were nice enough to make the display name for the e-mail state so.

I often have a business relationship with smaller firms who haven’t thought everything out, or don’t realize the impact… and who send out e-mails that just show up as “Frank” or “Chris”, and then use my first and last name in the subject line.

You know… the kind of stuff that’s indistinguishable from spam.

Regarding Pottery Barn’s e-mail list… I will assume that I somehow signed up for the mailings, so if I decide that I don’t want mail from them any more, I just tell them — I’d never flag it as spam.

But if Bob Jones from Jones Widgets sends me an e-mail that in Outlook tells me:
From: Bob Subject: Anthony Ortenzi, we have some great new products
or… even worse…
From: Bob Subject: %firstname% %lastname%, we have some great new products

What am I going to do? Manually flag it as spam. And if my spam filtering software does it’s job, I’m never going to see any e-mails from Bob Jones at Jones Widgets again.

With the consequences being what they are, if you’re sending out e-mails, first do a test run to another address of yours, and see that it looks like something you’d actually read… or at least not like something you’d reflexively block.

Don’t spend time and money trying to acquire customers or partners and then shoot yourself in the foot.