YES!! Oh my goodness…thank you so much for sharing this. Without intention, this is actually what I’ve been doing recently. I have, however, been feeling guilty about that number slowly creeping up of unread, not-so-important emails. Now – heck yes – I will wear that number with pride!! (And there is something about that mass delete that is so appealing…knowing that I could do without all of that stuff that was there in the first place. Hmmmm….)

Thank you, once again, for your insight.

I am in a full-out email revolt and eradication. I’m sick of being forced to cough up an email address to join forums or order something on line. My standard line when people ask is that “I don’t use email. You can call me or write me a regular letter if you need to communicate with me.” I’ve actually gotten into some pretty heated philosophical debates when mail-order (and yes, if you are shipping my product through some sort of delivery service, it is still considered mail-order) companies expect me to have an email address to give them. As I told one company, “…until the US Govt. MANDATES that every citizens must have a email address, you cannot disadvantage me as a customer for not using email.” What’s going to be next, disadvantaging me for not having a cellphone? When they get pushy and tell me that they must have an email address, I tell them to use theirs or create one for me. I am so sicked of having emails shoved down my throat in every aspect of my life.

I have, till recently, kept two email addresses for over 15 years (remember rocketmail?), one personal, and one “junk”. And for over 15 years that has worked great. I get very very very little junkmail in my personal email, and buckets of junk mail in my “junk mail” email. I have thousands of email messages there… and periodically I go in and zap them all; but mostly I ignore them. Great strategy.

But here’s the thing…. I now have an online business to sell some of what I make, jewelry, and I am struggling with the idea of keeping a mailing list, because everyone does it, because how else am I going to establish a relationship with customers and wanna-be customers, because as a customer I always give out my “junk email” address.

One of the reasons I love Facebook is because I can “like” a business or brand and if I don’t want to be bothered by them, I can “hide” them. Facebook puts the control of my relationship with vendors in my hands. So I’ve thought that I would encourage customers and wanna-be customers to “like” my business page (which you can do at http://www.facebook/com/whitecloudcreations)… shameful self promotion…. anyway… but I’m not sure if that’s a good direction to go; because people may not understand what I’m trying to do, that is, avoid cluttering up their email boxes needlessly and putting the control in their hands.

I guess the long and short of this is, as a consumer, and as this post discusses, I want to avoid “junk email” any way I can. As a supplier of goods (art or otherwise) I need to maintain a connection, a relationship, with my customers and potential customers in a meaningful way. How do you do that? What’s the best most pleasing way to both? And if I and 100,000 other suppliers do this, are we back at square one with an overloaded email box with “meaningful” email messages. Of course my solution above has the issue of creating thousands of “likes” that are all hidden in a Facebook stream.

Either way you slice it, there seems to be no easy answer for customer or supplier to maintining that relationship.