Then there’s all the rest of the email you get.  To get a fee eBook that looks interesting, you may have to sign on to someone’s mailing list.  Whenever you purchase something from an online store, you’re usually required to give them an email address, which they’ll then use to market to you for the rest of your natural life!  If you have a mailing list of your own  you’ll want to have one or more email addresses to be your “from” address, so all mail that comes in response to your newsletters will come to one place.

If you use safelists, you’ll really need some smart email space that has adequate space and will help you sort through the hundreds of emails you’ll get every day.  For this purpose I recommend Gmail.

Gmail, or Google Mail, is only one of hundreds of free email services on the Internet.  Why Gmail and not one of the others?  Several reasons:

• Gmail has all the space you’ll need – in fact, they keep adding more.  At this writing, it’s up to about 7 GB per account.  (Funny note, when they hit 1 GB per account, everyone thought it was an April Fool’s joke.  No one gave that much space free, and it just happened to occur on April 1st.)  If you DO need more space, you can buy more at very reasonable prices.  You can also archive older email which will save it in a compressed file.  It is still available for reading and searching functions.
• Many of the other free email services are banned by many of the safelists out there.  Gmail never is.  Yahoo is usually banned, although this may change as Yahoo has recently begun offering “unlimited space,” but this claim has yet to be tested.
• Gmail comes with an excellent spam filter that just keeps getting better.  If you receive spam, report it to Gmail.  They use this information from their client base to make better filters for everyone.
• Email organization within Gmail is second to none.  All responses to your sent emails are grouped together in “conversations,” making it simple to find everything related to your original post.
• You can filter emails based on a variety of criteria, allowing you to find certain emails or groups of emails quickly.  You can even sort them into labels as they come in, which was the subject of a previous blog post.
• You can use Google search within your email, even within your archived email.
• You can get your Gmail on your mobile phone device.

If you already have a Google account for Adwords or Adsense, you’ve already got a Gmail account.  Just log in and set it up.  If not you can apply and get one instantly here.  Note that multiple accounts are allowable.

Yes, I use safelists!  They really are effective, especially if your target audience is online marketers, especially new online marketers, or newbies.  These are the biggest users of safelists, and the ones most likely to read safelist emails.  It’s a great market to tap in order to put more eager, purchasing customers on your own mailing list.

The best safelists are those that require you to read other members’ emails in order to get enough credits to send your own.  Obviously, these are the only types that give you really any chance of having your emails read.  Without that requirement, there is no incentive for the email list member to do anything but go into his list email account occasionally and delete all.

But that means reading hundreds of emails every week, or even every day!  Or does it?  If you’re smart and you use Gmail, maybe not.  Use the incoming mail filter feature to sort your incoming mail by sender:

First set up a label for each safelist to which you belong – labels/manage labels/create new label.

Then filter incoming mail from each safelist to its label – select a message/drop down from “More Actions” to “filter messages like these.”

Then, anytime you need more credits in a particular safelist, just go choose that label and start reading and clicking for credits.  Note that these items are still in your inbox, so don’t delete your entire inbox until you’re sure you won’t need those sorted items anymore.

Learn more excellent tricks for safelists users in this handy little eBook, Ultimate Safelist Survival by Michael Cobb and Soren Jordansen.  It costs just $9.95 and it’s well worth it if you’re new or just don’t have a lot to spend on marketing.  Safelists could give you your start, but most people don’t use them effectively.