Mailman Steve Padgett, age 58, stood before a Federal Court judge recently to receive his sentence. The crime? Delaying and destroying the very mail he was supposed to be delivering– third class mail, or more commonly, the JUNK.

This spring, authorities were contacted by a utility worker who noticed what appeared to be an excessive amount of mail piled at Steve Padgett’s home in Raleigh. When postal authorities went to investigate, they discovered third-class mail stacked in Padgett’s garage and buried in his lawn.

According to Padgett’s attorney Andrew McCoppin, it wasn’t a conscious stand against waste or a junk mail protest that spurred the mailman to hold onto the mailers. Rather, it was the inability to meet the demands of a job in a growing part of the county while contending with heart problems and complications from his diabetes.

Padgett was given probation, fined and also sentenced to 500 hours of community service.  And as a way to express our support for Mailman Steve and his junk mail minimizing tactics, MailChimp has helped bail him out by contributing to a fund that will cover Padgett’s fines.

How does this relate to email marketing you ask? Mailman Steve was keeping the spam out of people’s physical mailboxes, in the same way that MailChimp works to keep it out of your inbox. By taking simple steps like creating a good permission reminder and adhering to proper emarketing etiquette, you can take steps to ensure your email’s relevance and deliverability.

Neil Schwartzman from ReturnPath asks, “Is Your Email an Invited Guest or a Drunken Frat-boy?”

“Now, when an invited guest comes into my home, and I suspect yours as well, they must ring the doorbell, be polite on their way in and during their visit, perhaps bring me a bottle of wine or other consideration, and thank me upon departure…Do you act like a honored guest, or a drunken frat-boy who shows up for 

the fifth time this week with a keg at 1 a.m., pounds on the door, breaking in through a window, vomiting on the couch, and finally passing out on the kitchen floor, and refusing to leave when roused?”

That’s the difference between permission email marketing, and “I-have-a-right-to-email-them” marketing.

If you request permission, send a proper welcome email message (with gift), and send relevant, expected emails to your subscribers, you’re an invited guest.

If you tell your sales team, “Okay, we’re blasting out an email campaign tomorrow, so everybody export your Outlook address books and CRMs and send me your batch of prospects asap,” you are that drunken frat boy.