AP 0434: How Do I Deal with a Tremendous Amount of Spam?

AskPat 434 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey what's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 434 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. We have a great and very important question from Tony today. But before we get to that, I do want to thank today's sponsor which is ZipRecruiter.com, which is an awesome website.

Because it's a pain when it comes to hiring people for your business. Maybe you're a solopreneur, or maybe you're an entrepreneur and you are looking to add more people to your company. Well, it can be really difficult and extremely time-consuming to send out job descriptions out to all the different job sites out there and vet all of the people who respond and the candidates and just how to find the best ones. Well, ZipRecruiter.com can make your life so much easier because they can post to 100 plus job sites with one single click. So you go through ZipRecruiter instead of going to all those other sites, and you can be instantly matched to candidates from over 6 million resumes. Plus, watch brand new candidates roll into ZipRecruiter's easy to use interface within 24 hours. And they've been used by nearly half a million different businesses. So if you're looking to hire, you gotta check it out. Head on over to ZipRecruiter.com/Pat. You can try it today for free. Again that's ZipRecruiter.com/Pat.

Alright, here's today's question from Tony.

Tony: Hi Pat. this is Tony Rose from BloggingDiabetes.com. My question for you today is around email and spam. I get about a couple hundred spam emails to my account every day, and I can't even get to some of the true emails that come in. And I feel like I'm missing things and deleting emails that I shouldn't be. So my question to you is, is there any way to stop all the spam email that comes to your account? And it's not Gmail, it's like a personal website-hosted email account. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks Pat.

Pat Flynn: Hey hey, Tony what's up? Thank you so much for the question. And first of all, so sorry to hear about those emails. I know that can be a major headache. And trust me, I know, because I got to a point where I was approaching 10 thousand unread emails, and every email that came in, I felt so bad because I knew I wasn't going to be able to answer them. Now, most of those emails were actually not spam emails. They were emails from real people, and I just didn't have a system, or a way, to actually tackle them. But since then, I've put a lot of things into place, and I'll talk about those things in a second that will help you no matter what kind of emails you're getting.

Let me talk about email spam and some quick, easy ways to tackle them. First of all, if you noticed that a lot of these emails that are coming in are coming from your website because people are leaving comments, and these comments are just spam comments then . . . Or you have a contact form on your website, and a lot of these emails are coming there, then there are some certain things you could do to get rid of them. The first one for the comments . . . This used to be an issue it isn't as much of an issue anymore, but there are some tools out there like Akismet. Which I don't really like at all, but that's the one that WordPress recommends, and they work with to get rid of some comment spam. There's the Captcha form ones where you have to type in a code or something before you can leave a comment. There are also some other plugins out there that are actually really good to battle the programs and bots that people use to leave comments automatically on sites where there are comment forms.

And some of those tools . . . I cannot remember the plugins off the top of my head, but there's a lot of them out there that allow you to place a button that people have to click on before they . . . It's essentially a radial button or something they have to click that says “Yes, I'm a human being.” Because the bots and programs can't do that, and the comment won't go through unless it's done. And I remember implementing that a number of years back when I was running on the WordPress comments, using the regular WordPress comment platform, it cut out all the comment spam by like 99 percent. Then I switched over to Disqus, or “discuss” as it's pronounced. I finally figured out what that actually meant. So Disqus. And that is a tool or a software that you can implement and put on your website to have people have to log in or connect via social media in order to leave a comment, and that has majorly cut down the spam comments as well.

Now some do get through every once in a while. Because there's flagging and reporting it kind of takes care of itself, which is really cool. But with the emails that come through that are spam, there's a couple things you can do. One is you can filter them. If, for example, you see a bunch mentioning some sort of pill, for example, that you have no idea why it's coming through, you can filter and blacklist the emails that come through that mention those particular words. And depending on what email service platform you use, or client, you can do that fairly easily.

You can also use some tools like SaneBox is one that I enjoy. They have been a sponsor of the show here as well. SaneBox.com/Pat and that will take you to a tool that allows you to get rid of a lot of the spam comments that are coming through as well. And it doesn't matter what email service client you have, it just makes it really easy for you to do that. SaneBox, SaneBox.com/Pat. Now that is a paid service. You can try it for 30 days I believe, or maybe 7 days for free. But it works. It absolutely works. And it helps cut out, and it understands which emails are spam and which ones are not.

Now there's a tool out there that I've been using for the last three or four years that has significantly cut down my email spam and increased my productivity, and that is using Google Apps for Business, specifically the Gmail client for my business. Now that doesn't mean that my email has a Gmail.com, or @gmail.com email address. I can still use my business address, [email protected]. It just happens to be running through the Gmail client, and it allows me to be able to do a number of things that help with spam and also just the functionality and productivity with my email. So for one, it's using Gmail's sort of spam library, and can cut out significantly all the spam emails. It kind of puts them all into a folder for you, and they've been 99 percent correct the whole time, in terms of not showing me those and having them be correct. I mean 99.9999 percent of the time, virtually 100 percent. It also has the ability for you to create categories and tags, and easily filter, and vacation replies. And all the things that an email service client would do, but it just does it so much better.

And that in combination with hiring Jessica, who's my assistant who specifically runs and filters my emails for me, the emails that actually do come through that are not spam emails . . . but, you know, I get literally 400 or 500 emails a day . . . She makes sure that I only see the emails that I need to see today. And that's been a great, and such a blessing to be able to work with Jessica. You can actually listen to an episode that she and I have done together, where she talks about how she was able to tackle my inbox of nearly 10 thousand unread emails and the process for doing that, and how we work together now to be able to tackle emails no matter what kind of emails come through, whether they're spam or even emails from real people, and how she answers some of them, how some of them get put into my urgent folder, which I look at first before anything. And some of them get put into a second tier folder which is one that I look at once or twice every week. So go ahead and check that episode out. You can check it out SmartPassiveIncome.com/Session115.

But I think if you wanted to really cut down on spam in a quick way, it's one of two things, or using a combination of both actually. Sanebox.com/Pat, and/or, Google Apps for Work using their Gmail client. And if you just look up Google, or if you lookup on Google “Gmail Business Apps,” you'll see exactly what I'm talking about and what it can do for you. It just makes it so easy to use and so easy to cut down on the spam, because Google, you know, they collect tens of millions of emails a day, and they know which ones are spam and they're able to help you filter through them for you.

So Tony, I hope that this answers your question, or at least gives you some ideas or starting points. Thank you so much. We're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. And for everybody out there who has a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com, and you can ask right there on that page. I appreciate it so much because obviously this show wouldn't exist without the questions. It would just be Pat, not AskPat. But thank you for making it AskPat and making it everything that it is. It's all you guys. Thank you.

I also wanted to thank today's sponsor which is ZipRecruiter.com. Again, they can post to 100 plus job sites for you with a single click. So if you're looking to hire more people for your company . . . You know as a business owner, your business is only as good as the people you hire right? And posting jobs in one place really isn't enough to find quality candidates, you know, just doing one job site. You want as many candidates who will see the description as possible. And they actually . . . What's really cool with ZipRecruiter is they will help find those great candidates for you. They actually help filter and find the best ones for whatever position you're looking to fill. And you gotta check it out because really the recruiting process is extremely painful, and you lose money every day you don't have somebody else working for you who can do those things that you know somebody else can do. So make it easy on yourself and head on over to ZipRecruiter.com/Pat. You can try it for free. And again just ZipRecruiter.com/Pat. It makes it so easy for you to find the people you need to help grow your business. ZipRecruiter.com/Pat. Thank you so much for listening in. I appreciate you and all you do to help support the show, and if you want to do one more thing for me. Head on over to iTunes and leave a review for AskPat. That would mean the world to me.

And as always, we end with a quote. And today's quote is from W.P. Kinsella. And that quote is, “Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.”

So profound. Cheers, take care, and I'll see you next week in the next episode of AskPat. Thank you.