Just saw a blog entry that hit home on my daily RSS scan. I always check out the Sherpa Feed to see what’s going on and this is what caught my eye.

MarketingSherpa > Are You Losing Important Customer Emails to Your Filters?

I know if you are like me, (or Anne Holland from Sherpa) you have been around the online marketing space for a while and in the course of daily life have picked up a ton of both valid and invalid marketing email subscriptions and it’s become overwhelming. So, just slap some filter software on there and all will be okay right ? Wrong.

Automated filters will catch a ton of your spam and lighten up your load that way, but it may also trap some important messages. If you aren’t going in regularly ( often enough to match up with your corporate email return policy ) and scanning manually for accidentally filtered valid messages from prospects or clients, you may be missing out on business.

Anne recommends that the only really safe play here is to work with a Filtering package that filters based on IP address of known spammers. Even this still needs to be checked on though as a spammer may have worked with a hosting provider in the past and contaminated their IP range.

So - always make sure to scrub your “filtered” lists daily to make sure you aren’t leaving money on the table.