How to Avoid StumbleUpon Email Spam

How to Avoid StumbleUpon Email Spam

Posted on 18. Mar, 2009 by Nate in SMO, Starting an Online Business

stumbleupon-logoDo you save web pages to your favorites or book marks on your computer?

Why?

What happens if you’re at a friends house and you want to share a favorite article, picture or video clip but you can’t remember what the address is?

You don’t have your favorites or book marks on the friends computer – what are you going to do?

StumbleUpon is the solution! (at least one of them)

StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of 7,295,678 other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating these sites you like () automatically shares them with like-minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend. source

I’ve been using Stumbleupon (SU) for almost 2 years now. I’ve learned a lot of StumbleUpon strategies, seen a lot, tested a lot, and received many valuable links and loads of traffic via SU.

One thing I do a lot of is share links with my SU friends.  The easiest way in the past to do this is by using the SU Toolbar:

stumbleupon-toolbar

The “Send to” button was a great way to send messages to SU friends, ask them to favorite something, and build links.

su-send-to-button

However, it took so long to send a message to the hundreds of thousands of friends online because you had to select each friend individually.

StumbleUpon saw this problem too!

They recently released a new share feature that’s talked about more here.

Social Media Maven Muhammad Saleem (follow him on twitter – @msaleem) discovered the new feature:

su-share-msaleem

But, like anything new, there were issues that came up once the new StumbleUpon Share tool was released:

  • Welcome to SPAM-ville! The share feature encourages “Black Hat SEOers” to spam, spam, spam (meaning they will send out links to anyone and everyone that have NOTHING to DO with what you like). This was “Tweeted” by @msaleem just 29 minutes after his announcement of the new tool:su-spam
  • Email Overload: one of the main issues I had was, when SU friends sent me articles or something to add to my favorites, I would get HUGE influxes of email from StumbleUpon.

The good news is, thanks to a Twitter friend @the_gman (follow him), I was reminded that I can change the setting on my SU account so all the emails won’t come in.  Here’s how:

  1. Go to your SU Account

  2. Select Preferences:

    su-preferences

  3. Find the Communication & Privacy settings:

    su-email-settings

  4. Unselect all the email options.

How does this change your mind about the new StumbleUpon share feature?

Will StumbleUpon be back on your social media list of “Must-Do’s”?

I feel it’s regained my trust!

Happy Stumbling!

15 Responses to “How to Avoid StumbleUpon Email Spam”

  1. Dan

    18. Mar, 2009

    Stumble is great for a lot of things, but for keeping track of sites that I really want to remember later I use Delicious.

    Reply to this comment

    • Nate Moller

      18. Mar, 2009

      Why do you use Delicious more? I have my ideas but would like to hear it from the horses mouth :)

      Thanks for the comment!

      Reply to this comment

      • Dan

        18. Mar, 2009

        I find that Delicious is easier to search through. So for stuff that I think is kinda cool but will probably never look at again I’ll use Stumble. But in order to find something later Delicious has proven easier to search through for me.

        Reply to this comment

  2. Big Hoss

    18. Mar, 2009

    I have also used Stumleupon for a couple of years and have recently started using it for helping my websites grow. Thanks for the tip I will implement it right away. I hate spam!!

    Reply to this comment

  3. Gerald Weber

    18. Mar, 2009

    Very useful given the concern Stumbles are having regarding email overflow due to the new share feature.

    Reply to this comment

  4. p@r@noid

    18. Mar, 2009

    Thanks to gman tweet I landed here and now I’m gng to make changes :)

    Reply to this comment

  5. Mick Rogers

    18. Mar, 2009

    I use delicious also…not just stumble

    Reply to this comment

  6. Shana Albert

    18. Mar, 2009

    Great post, Nate!!! I so needed this….. I couldn’t take much longer of getting this much SU Spam. Thank you for writing something on it. :)

    Reply to this comment

  7. Shefali

    18. Mar, 2009

    Very useful info..sending a page to friends was time taking and I often use to think of such feature where i can send a page to all my friends with least efforts :) . But at the same time I was annoyed with floods of SU mails from friends. After reading this article I immediately changed my SU settings :) This article is very informative. Thanks to SuperFreak69 for sharing….

    Reply to this comment

  8. Rufor

    20. Mar, 2009

    Greatings,
    Thanks for article. Everytime like to read you.

    Thanks
    Rufor

    Reply to this comment

Leave a Reply