Email revolutionised the internet. It was the first medium for sharing e-content that could have been a wonderful photo or some scandal mongering video clip. That is no longer the case; social media has taken up the place of email.
While you may need to invite people into your electronic cycle on social media like Facebook, you do not need to do so for email. All you have to know is somebody email address and lo! Your message will be able to find its way straight into somebody’s inbox.
That is perhaps what is wrong with the system. Marketing mafias soon caught on the vulnerability and devised all sorts of email harvesting techniques. One culprit of this malpractice is the web crawling king, Google. To be eligible for free lunch like Google Drive, you need to log in using your email address.
Google wants to know your email because it wants to study your behavior and find companies that sell products that you may like and let such companies inhabit your inbox with all sorts of marketing materials. As noble as that may sound, you soon find yourself submerged with emails that you never have time for.
Soon you realise that it is not only Google website but YouTube, Yahoo, Askmen , Goodreads and many other websites that will require you to supply your email address in exchange of their “freebies”. That will result into an inbox that takes ages to differentiate between spam and real messages.
Social media sites like Facebook help balloon inboxes. There is a beautiful word for it, notification. Facebook sends activities of your community that it thinks you will be interested in to your email box anytime you are not online. Have you ever wondered why these notifications are not sent through Facebook’s messaging system?
Email still remains a great tool for business communication. I am sure, by now, you know why you should never ever share your business email address on any website.
The emails that you supply to websites can be used in much clever ways these days. There is what is called social integration. Assuming that you use one email address to log on to LinkedIn and Twitter, social integrations software can be used to reveal your tweets and LinkedIn profile.
Let me end this by stealing a line from Russell H. Conwell’s 1921 classic “Acres of diamonds” lecture; if you forget everything I have said to you, do not forget this, because it contains more in one line than all I said: Do not supply your business email on websites that ask you do so.
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