Freelance with Yahoo Spam Guard on = Bye bye new jobs

If you use Yahoo mail with Spam Guard turned on, then you might as well forget about new clients contacting you directly at that email address. That’s sounds alarmist, but from doing years of customer service with CartoonSmart and contacting many people at their Yahoo address, I know this is a real problem…First off, for customer service I use my @mac.com address.  I am NOT emailing customers with my site’s domain mail (for example,  @cartoonsmart.com ).  As such, contacting someone with a major mail provider like mac.com to another major mail provider like yahoo.com should not be an issue. Period.  But over and over again, it is. And usually the customer will contact me FIRST, and then I’ll send a direct reply to that email, which will get blocked by Spam Guard. Repeat: A direct reply! Why on earth would that ever get blocked. The person initiated contact with me.  So how do I ever solve this customer service blockage. Well after many useless attempts at replying, I’ll switch over to another email address (like an old hotmail one) and request that the customer turn off Spam Guard so we can communicate.  As soon as they do, wha-lah! Everything is fine. 

So if your freelance website says “hey contact me at [you]@yahoo.com” , it is very possible the interested client will email and then just never hear back from you because you never got it. OR the client will get an email back which says that their mail to you has been deferred. And I’ll share with you a forum about this because the deferred issue is something I’ve seen many times…  Getting Your IP Whitelisted with Yahoo …You don’t have to read the whole thing, but scan it at least. You’ll see the lengths at which someone would have to go to, to get their email address/IP approved by Yahoo if it did get deferred.

So here’s when you might want to use Yahoo’ Spam Guard. If you’re only ever expecting email from family and friends that you’ve address booked. Then its perfect, the tons of spam you get will definitely be blocked out, and you’ll have a very clean inbox. But if you’re a working professional, and deal with unknown emails regularly, then puuuuh-leeease,  switch to another service.

Rant over.