Be Sure to Check Your Email
Recently, I was doing my daily sweepstakes. I was in a hurry, and I'd gone through several pages of sweeps. I entered the Universal $50,000 Instant Win Sweepstakes that I'd been entering for weeks with no luck, and got a "Sorry You Didn't Win" message as usual.
To my surprise, when I was checking my email later, I received a "Congratulations on your win!" message from Universal for that entry. I'm not sure whether I misread the winning message in my haste, or if it simply didn't display properly, but in either case it underscores an important point - be sure to check your email carefully for wins. In my case, I was lucky because the email from Universal clearly showed that I was a winner in the subject line - but many notifications are sneakily hidden under subject lines that are far from apparent at first glance. Some of them simply give the name of the sweepstakes; others are nearly impossible to tell from regular email marketing at first glance.
That's why it's so very important to check your sweepstakes email carefully for win notifications. It would be heartbreaking to win a fantastic prize and miss the response deadline because you thought it was spam, or because you started to feel like checking your email wasn't worth it. It's a good idea to open every mail in your sweepstakes inbox, to unsubscribe from newsletters that don't interest you to reduce the amount of mail to weed through, and to check in your spam mail folder as well, to make sure that no wins pass you by!
Comments
I HAD THE SAME THING HAPPEN TO ME I RECENTLY WON 2 VIP PASSES TO BONNAROO
Congratulations on your win! Did they use a subject line for the email that was hard to recognize as a win notice?
I’ve had several e-mails telling me I’ve won from Kia overseas in Germany, one from England and the like, but they all want me to send money to pay for this and that and I told them I would not pay one thin dime for anything I won, that I would be paying here in the states the Federal and State taxes and thats it. They still keep bugging me but as far as I’m concerned they are scams and not worth looking into.
You’re absolutely right, those sound like scams to me, too. You might want to check out my article on sweepstakes scams for more information. You can also report the scammers to the proper authorities. Good for you for not falling for it!
Congratulations! How do I enter this sweepstakes? None of the links actually take you to the sweepstakes. Thank you.
Amanda, you’re right, I’m sorry about the oversight! I’ve updated the profile to include the proper links. Thanks for pointing that out!
Sorry to disagree with you but with the mountains of illegal/criminal spam emails flooding the Internet, there must be better advice than to open all emails whether you recognize them or not. By opening the bad ones, you’re just letting the spam gangsters know that there’s a live prospect on your end. You can then expect your spam numbers to increase daily.
Blackie, you never need to apologize for disagreeing – you raise a great point, and I am really glad that you did.
My response got to be a little long for a comment, so I turned it into a full blog post. I will probably also write some articles on good email practices and safety. Thank you very much for the thought-provoking comment!
More to # 7 above: For those who just blow off warnings about the malignancy of spam and the bottomfeeding reptiles who flood the Internet with it, read the news from May 30 & 31 about the arrest of Robert Soloway in Seattle, WA. This parasite is responsible for filling inboxes around the world with piles and piles of spam garbage. For more see >spamhaus.org
I would think that this problem would drive the judging agencies crazy too because they could potentially have MANY of their winners not see the win and they would have to keep re-drawing for a winner!!! I think that it might be a good idea for a bunch of us here to write to some of the major sweeps to suggest creating a safer, better way to notify the winners.
Virginia