Real Estate Agents Become Easy Targets For Spam, Why?

I hear it on a fairly regular basis. “Why do I get So Much Spam!?”. Well, the long of the short is because real estate professionals put their email addresses everywhere. Agents want to be the one a potential buyer or seller contacts first, and these days an email address is as important as a phone number.

This very fact is in my studied opinion why real estate agents end up being hot targets for spam. Within this posting I will outline some useful tips to help cut spam and better manage your email account.

1) If you have an email account that gets tons of spam, convert it to a spam collecting account. You will never get spam to stop going to that account and it will always increase. It’s a lost cause. You should keep the account however and check it for emails that are important especially as you transition to a new account.

2) Get a new business email address, better yet get two. Use one account for customers and client correspondence and the other as a general business communications account. If you give your customers one account, not only can you better manage the emails, only they will have them. The limited people that have the address means it is less likely you will end up on  spam list.

3) Request your email remain private. Some customers become friends, and friends love to forward junk to everyone they know, effectively distributing your email address to countless people you don’t know.

4) DO NOT post your email address on your website! There are software robots that crawl the internet with one goal, mining email addresses to spam. A better solution is to have your webmaster create a contact me form that users can fill out that will generate an email to you. This hides the address from the outside world and you can still get emails from potential customers. Also, do not allow your local real estate board post your email address on their website. Rule of thumb – Email Addy on Website Bad.
5) Use your old account (the junk account from tip 1) when registering for anything online. DO NOT use your business or personal email address. As tempting as it is, the goal is to prevent spam. When you buy something online, register for a newsletter, request information or sign up for something, use your junk account. Then check it for the email your expecting and forward it to your Fort Knox account. It’s a pain in the rear, but you won’t have to deal with spam. I can assure you the minute you submit your email address somewhere it is stored to send you stuff in the future. If you happen to get something you don’t want, be sure unsubscribe to it.

6) Spam filters have pro’s and cons to them. Most will let emails through but places them in a spam folder that you later have to sift through. I prefer to just set up message rules (which can me done in most clients such as Outlook, Eudora, Apple Mail) for common spam words such as viagra……..you get the point.

If you can managed to do these 6 simple things, you will easily keep the spam at bay.