While email is still the very best way to both market and to pass along free information to those who want it, it’s a complete mess. Here’s why.

1. All the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too people. They get on your list by some means, either by subscribing directly, or grabbing something free (like a download) that clearly informs them the tradeoff is that they’re on the email list (but they can unsubscribe with 1-click at the bottom of every single email). Then they go apeshit when they get an email. Entitlement mentality.
2. Woke email-service-provider companies. Wokeness and entitlement go hand-in-hand; so, woke, simping companies try their best to cater to the fringe. Understandably, SPAM merchants are pernicious and unrelenting (and SPAM filtering has gotten pretty good). The problem is when these companies take it upon themselves to “go the extra mile” and include all sorts of keywords, so as to be “just looking out for you.” It’s almost impossible to send an email that’s not sterile, boring bullshit and not hit a verboten keyword.
3. The worst thing of all is that some email providers automatically file an abuse-complaint with my email-list provider (Amazon SES) if somebody marks an email as SPAM rather than simply hit the 1-click unsubscribe link at the bottom of all emails (Let me reiterate: it’s 1-click, and you’re done; unlike the asshole spammers out there, you do NOT have to “enter your email address” to unsubscribe.).

Now, our complaint-rate is incredibly low, so these “complaints” (or those filed directly by people sometimes) have no real effect and our CRM automatically removes them (as well as bounces, and unsubscribes) automatically, so there’s no chance another email goes out (…it does not take 3–5 days to remove you like the asshole spammers tell you; it’s instant, and even if there are campaigns scheduled to go out in the future…then at the time of sending, the current valid-recipients are created on the fly at that time of sending, not what it was when the campaign was created and scheduled).

Anyway, the foregoing, I hope, assures you and anyone that we take this stuff seriously, and we don’t mind anyone unsubscribing if they don’t want our emails.

By all means.

Here are the general instructions for whitelisting our emails so that you actually get them and even if they hit those woke keywords, they stop looking out for you, for your convenience, and get the email to you anyway.

Email Clients

These are the email applications you use on your desktop/laptop or devices.

1. Put ‘Richard Nikoley’ and rn@freetheanimal.com in your contacts.
2. Scan down your SPAM or Junk folder periodically and if you notice us in there, then select it and mark ‘Not Spam’ or ‘Not Junk’ if that option is available and/or, move the email to your inbox. One or both of these procedures should ‘train’ your application.

Email Web Clients

These are the email applications you access via a website URL, not a particular app on whatever you’re using, computer or device.

Google, Yahoo, iCloud, Outlook, Microsoft, and AOL are common such providers, and some go by a bunch of different names, such as all the brands Microsoft uses.

It’s the same procedure as above, only you’re doing it on their end. And this is actually helpful to us, because it’s like ‘voting’ that we’re not spammers. If we’re in a lot of people’s web-based contacts lists, then that data helps to train the system as a whole, and the greater the chance that when an entitled moron comes along, the system dismisses them as the clueless asshole, shit-for-brains they are, who can’t even click a 1-click.

Both

This is where it gets tricky. You, like me, probably have both. While I use email clients on both by machines and devices, I use a couple of different providers that also have web-based clients and SPAM filtering, so it gets filtered before it gets to my computer/device client.

The thing is, most all have filtering enabled by default, both the web-based and your computer/device apps. So, you need to run through the procedure for both.

Otherwise, you’ll have one or the other killing an email, and it gets confusing.

No way around doing it for both.

Shoot me an email if you have any questions. For sure, you will not hit my SPAM or JUNK folders. It may even end up in the IMPORTANT folder.