Safelist over the hill? Not really!

The word “safelist” probably does the same to you as it does to myself: on the one hand it reminds me of clogged-with-spam email accounts, on the other hand I smile contentedly because of the many sales safelist advertising has brought me. And still brings me, actually - which is the point of this article.

In a sense the great days of the safelist are already gone. For years they’ve been popping up all over the internet, and if you look at some of the automatic safelist submitters you’ll see astonishing numbers of lists to submit to, in fact many thousands. Most of these safelists however are neither “safe” nor “lists”: in the slightly less depressing cases they’re simply defunct, in worse cases they’re just spam machines running on autopilot.

Yet there’s still money in the list - in this case the safelist. I think it all depends on the owner, and how he or she runs the place. Until early this year I owned “Shavelist”, the name already indicating that it was an unusual safelist. It certainly was: many personal notes and anecdotes were posted among the usual marketing messages, and it was much to my own dismay and that of the members when Shavelist suddenly died as the result of a little misunderstanding that triggered an avalanche or other issues. Sure, the whole lot was sorted out to my satisfaction in almost no time at all - but the poor Shavelist had already died.

But blood is thicker than water, and my internet marketers blood simply drove me to creating a new, equally unusual safelist: Yahrps List which has just been born. May the baby grow and prosper, proving to all and sundry that safelists are far from dead!