Most of the internet posting sites ask for your email address as part of the posting process. Site like craigslist (http://www.craigslist.org) , Backpage (http://www.backpage.com) , Kijiji (http://www.kijiji.com) etc ask your email address to send you a ‘publishing’ email that you follow instructions to finish the final step.

There is more to this than meets the eye. Surprisingly, there is lot more to it.

 

Your email address as part of posting process is used for several things.

  1. To make sure (at least try) that the poster is not an automated program that just posts some spam and leaves the site. Asking for email address and sending an email that one need to look and follow instructions is one more obstacle to discourage automate bot based posting.
  2. To track the postings done by particular person - assuming the person is using single email address for all the postings. (more on this tracking and how sites can track you even if you use ‘different’ email addresses.
  3. To use the email address as a way viewers can respond to your ad - if you choose so. Some sites give you option to opt-out and show anonymous email address (masked) or do not show email address at all.

While email address as part of your posting is important piece of information, as I mentioned earlier, it can (and will) be used to track your posting and ban you. While you are probably ok with 1) and 3) of above, I am sure you would like to know more about 3). Lets dive in to it.

Be assured that every letter of your email address submitted during posting process will be used to track your posts, if you are found violating terms of service.

There are few types of email addresses (not a exhaustive list)

  • Business specific email addresses: These are email addresses that use your own domain name. For example, you have website called http://www.jackandjill.com and you use email address on that domain name such as dave@jackandjill.com, mac@jackandjill.com etc.
  • Public email addresses (or freely available email provider addresses). These are from email service providers such as yahoo, hotmail, gmail.com, dave.co.fr etc.

Now the question is, which one is safe to use on posting sites and why ?

 

Contrary to popular belief, business specific email addresses are not a good idea to use on posting sites. Some folk may advice that with your own business domain (like jackandjill.com) you can create virtually unlimited number of email addresses such as jack@jackandjill.com, dave@jackandjill.com, jimmy@jackandjill.com so on, so forth.

 


Think about it for a second. Posting sites not only look for unique email addresses, they also look for patterns in those email addresses. If the posting site software or the people who are reviewing look at your supposedly unique email addresses, its easy to realize that all of them share same pattern - they end with domain name jackandjill.com . Unless jackandjill.com is huge company (we will come to it soon) with 1000s of users that use their email systems, the posting sites dont even think a second before blocking jackandjill.com domain on email addresses.

 

Now, instead, imagine jackandjill.com is large internet service provider - such as they provide free email service to millions of people who are not related in anyway. If the posting sites block jackandjill.com , they are potentially blocking 1000s of users who otherwise would have posted ads. I am talking about email service providers like yahoo.com , hotmail.com , gmail.com etc. Most people today have free email accounts with large email service providers like these. And posting sites cannot email addresses with these domain names - not atleast at the domain name level. Otherwise they would also be blocking 1000s other users who want to post with their yahoo or hotmail or gmail email addresses.

 

So what does it tell you ? Use publicly available email accounts from the likes of yahoo.com, hotmail.com, gmail.com etc . But here is another gotcha. DO NOT use email addresses from provider that other haven’t heard off. What are the chances of getting blocked you post with jack@dave.co.fr , assuming dave.co.fr is providing free email service to public ? 100% of chance of getting blocked. Why ? Because how many people you know heard of dave.co.fr and use it as their email provider ? None.

The strategy here is BLEND IN and not STAND OUT .

Blending in by using email addresses from popular free email service providers does

  • Provide anonymity to you
  • Protect your privacy
  • Protect you from getting blocked

Hope you enjoyed this session. There are tons of other ways you can protect from getting blocked, banned, flagged.

And you are going to read them right here on All About Posting : Tips, Tricks, Rants, Stats, Help, Pulp :-) Enjoy.