Ah! Spam!

Spam is the bane of email. We all hate the stuff dumped into our inbox but how does your mail service determine what gets into your inbox . . . or block it all together?

More and more of us are using search tools to find information on the web and, rather than make a series of phone calls that require us to leave a message and wait for you to call back (on average, 45 seconds per call to listen to your phone ring several times, listen to your message and then record ours), we would rather send emails to you asking you to contact us. In my case, I have a letter that describes the job I'm working on and asks you to call me. I can send this email to a  lot of people concurrently and save time that I then spend helping to do research, business development and network.

But after I send the email, what happens next?

Well, Earthlink requires that I deal with their email interface to verify that I haven't just down an auto generated spam assault; it's not too bad. I manually re-enter the subject of my email and enter a few randomly generated characters.

Hotmail automatically outs everything into your junk mail folder that isn't in your address book Unless you develop the habit of checking your junk mail during your job search, you will miss opportunities.

AOL seems to be the worst in this regard. They will block an entire domain if a few complaints occur. Do you think among 20 million people they might mistakenly complain about an email?

Gmail  (http://mail.google.com ) is terrific. The spam filtering is great. Yahoo is good, too.

Set up a separate account for your job search and put it on your resume. Check it more often than you do your personal account (at least 3 times a day) in the late morning and late afternoon while at work and then during the evening. In this way, you won't miss companies or recruiters attempting to contact you about opportunities.

Remember, time is rarely your ally during a job search. Take too long to get back to someone and they are likely to have screened others for the job and you'll get locked out.

Yesterday, I received a call from someone who said they had received an email from me in November (as I write this it is March 1) and wondered if the job was still available. Are you kidding me? I filled the job long ago.

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