When you submit your site to directories, you normally have to give them a valid email address.

Some directories use this email to let you confirm that your really want to be listed, other offer you updated and paid positions additionally to your free submission or send you a regular newsletter.

It depends on you if this newsletter is useful or not. Some directories use their newsletter to simply inform you about updates while others will try to sell all sorts of stuff to you. Related and unrelated to your directory submission. That all can create some extra emails in your inbox. But that is not really a problem. You know where it is coming from and you can easily unsubscribe.

A much bigger over the time for me are the listing of my email address with the directory listing. Nice that it’s so easy to contact the webmaster for link exchange you might think, but it is also very easy for link harvesters to grab your email address from there and sell it to a spammer. Suddenly you get lots of obscure emails, you inbox overflows with rubbish.

You will not be able to avoid that completely, but one solution is an extra email account just for directory submissions. Ideally you do not use one from your domain but grab a free email account with google mail or similar services.

Advantages:

• You will have your nice name@yourdomain.com email for your customer contacts and another one for directory submission.
• You don’t need to sort though heaps of rubbish every day to find emails from your customers.
• You only need to check this extra account from time to time to see if you need to send a confirmation email but you can mainly leave it alone.

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