Guidelines on E-mail Solicitations

Image credit: Photo by freezelight on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

I get a lot of e-mail each day, and adore most of it. I smile and laugh and cry as I read, because most of it is from people who can relate to what I write about and who want to share their experiences and thoughts and hopes and fears.

So, if you are thinking of writing me a personal e-mail, go for it. I'd love to (virtually) meet you or get to know you better. If you have built a relationship with me and want to forward me a cool article on autism or addiction or share something about a cause that's important to you, go for it. (I get some great post ideas for all of you.) I really love to hear from you bloggy friends, even if don't always get back to you in a timely manner. (Ahem. To the 196 people whose messages currently sit in my inbox tonight: I will respond someday. I promise on my codependent perfectionist honor.)

However, some of you -- the ones who most need to read this post and probably never will, because you don't tend to actually read the blog at all -- some of you are a little spammy. So, I thought I'd offer a few guidelines for those who are considering sending me a solicitation:

• I don't do link exchanges. If you would like me to link to you, do one of two things: 1. Be nice, build a good relationship with me, read and comment regularly or 2. Pay for advertising space.
  
  
• I won't write free posts about products or services. While I know you think that your camping gear or organizing software or recipe finder is the coolest thing ever, unless it is an affordable robot manservant that will do my dishes and laundry and clean the litter box, I'm not going to get so excited about it that I will spontaneously spend an hour of my "me time" writing a post to endorse it for free. I will, however, consider doing it for money or a free robot manservant or a really cool on-topic book.
  
  
• I won't write about your charity. As much as I'm sure that your cause of feeding hungry children or ridding the world of landmines or greening our energy is very important, I'm not going to post about it either. There are just too many causes and too many organizations for me to determine which ones deserve my time and energy. And I have trust issues. Read the blog. Somewhere deep inside I suspect you all of being computer savvy heroin addicts posing as charities for drug money, and I don't feel it's an effective use of my time to do the research necessary to build trust for every one of the bazillions of charity solicitations I get. I do have causes I work on in my real life, but I prefer not to link those to the blog for anonymity reasons. Please send me celebrity sex addiction gossip like everyone else does instead.

Oh, and it's ok if you didn't get around to reading all this. You'll get another chance. Gmail has this cool canned response feature, so you'll just be getting an edited version of this post back if you do write.