Many couples getting in touch with me are clearly using a specially created email account for all their wedding correspondence. Unfortunately many are using Hotmail accounts. Practically all Hotmail accounts I’ve ever gotten emails from have been hacked.
So my advice if you’re setting up a special email account for your wedding planning is:

1. Don’t use Hotmail. Hotmail seems to be the easiest web based service to hack, and is very indiscriminate with what it considers junk.
2. Do use Gmail. My experience suggests Gmail is a much more secure than other free webmail services.
3. Do check your junkmail. Even the cleverest webmail service makes mistakes, and your supplier’s reply might have gone in with all your Nigerian lottery winnings!
4. Use a strong password. Do not use pet’s names, favourite colours, dates of birth etc. Passwords should be a random string of letters and numbers, and longer than 6 characters for maximum security.
5. Use Bcc. If you’re contacting multiple suppliers in the same email use the Bcc: field rather than the To: field. This way if you do get hacked there isn’t a ready-made email list for the hackers to use.

It’s worth paying attention to this right at the start. It’s much easier than having to tell your friends and contacts that you are not actually in the business of selling cheap electronics from China!

I get many emails from various Irish and international directories offering free this and that all the time. Most of them are very spammy- they’re unsolicited bulk emails with no personalisation at all and are generally full of links and breathless copy about how brilliant they are. Occasionally I get personalised correspondence that I’ll reply to just to see what’s on offer. And then there are times when someone follows up with a phonecall, and I end up with a good deal that I might have missed.
Spammy emails don’t irk me as much as they do some, but I think they’re a terrible precendent in Irish marketing. The one I got today though is such a shining beacon of doing it wrong I’m reproducing it here. I’m not naming and shaming, but remember, this is an Irish company trying to sell me something.

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If you made it this far well done. I couldn’t take my eyes off it in horror at the lack of punctuation, proper formatting, and spelling mistakes (I don’t want to be “apart of this” thanks).
In my humble opinion screaming your message without drawing a breath or finishing a sentence isn’t going to convert anyone into a customer.