Make Sure Your Emails Make You Reachable

Make Sure Your Emails
Make you Reachable

Yesterday, someone sent me an unsolicited resume by email, and his background wasn’t close to any of my current assignments, so I sent out a polite no thank you.

I received this response:

The message you sent requires that you verify that you
are a real live human being and not a spam source.

To complete this verification, click on the attached link:

The link took me to what is known as a Captcha, which you’ve seen many times on sites that are prone to spamming:

I had to type that unreadable word into a box to allow him to receive my no-thank-you email.

This is a lot of work for someone to go through to contact you. It’s annoying.

More frequent than the Captcha is the email address that bounces. You’d be surprised at how often I send an email response to a resume email address and the address bounces back.

Will I try to contact the person in some other fashion? If they look really good? Yes. They may wind up in my do-it-later pile if they are so-so. And if someone better emerges, I never get to the pile of marginal candidates.

These email irritations become even bigger obstacles when you're trying to do some networking - connecting with the friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend that you don't know. The chance that that person will jump through email hoops to contact you is remote.

So test your emails. To make sure your return email address is correct, send one to someone you know, and have them reply to that email. Make sure your name is spelled correctly (and use your name, not your spouse's name, motorman or y64@nero.com) when it shows up on the from line in your friend's inbox. Remove any prove-to-me-you’re-human auto-responders from your emails.

Also, turn off all spam filters. These things aren’t smart enough to determine spam from true business communication, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had someone call to tell me that they just found the email I sent three weeks ago in their spam filter. That's often three weeks too late.