A safelist is a website that provides a way for people who join to send out ads and information to each other. Many of the ads found on safelists concern ways to make money online. Safelists were created mainly in response to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which placed serious restrictions on spamming and which allows for prosecution of those individuals and companies who transgress these restrictions. Safelists are "safe" because they provide a place for people to advertise without being accused of spamming, which can get you into all sorts of trouble if enough people complain. No one who is really trying to create a business online wants to be accused of spamming.

Safelists come in all sizes, as they can be owned or started by anyone who wants one, Some of them have thousands of members, while others have just a few. There are also services called "safelist submitters," which allow you to join and send to hundreds or thousands of safelists at once. If you are submitting to thousands of safelists, you are sending your emails to hundreds of thousands or millions of people, which sounds very exciting. Safelists have been considered for several years now to be the best place for new marketers or "newbies" to start their business. But, do they really work? For the most part, safelist marketing has become obsolete and outdated. It used to work much better, but since everyone's doing it, it doesn't work very well anymore, especially because many people now use huge mailboxes that can automatically delete all messages. In that way, people don't have to go through their mailboxes and actually look at any of the mail, which means they aren't really reading any of the messages.

What does work?

With a very catchy or striking subject line, you can still get a few people here and there to open your email, provided you send out enough of them to the safelists and at the right time of the week and day. The correct time and date are usually considered to be "secrets," but they are common sense. Weekends are usually not a good time, as people are interested not in work but in play at that time. Many people work in offices and don't want to read emails after they get home, if they even have a home computer, so there are many people reading (and deleting) their messages during lunch hour. Now, "lunch hour" varies around the world, as does the "weekend," so you will have to account for when that will occur most appropriately for your business enterprise. If you join a safelist submitter that mails to at least 1 million people, if you have a catchy subject line and a compelling body copy, and if you send out these messages - rotating your ads - at the appropriate times of day and week, you may see a satisfying amount of traffic going to your website. In this sense, it can be said that safelists do work, but that "iffy" success is only one part of the net-marketing battle!