I hear that brotha! I get those darn charity scam emails all day long. The worst is the "Dear Sir/Madam", "Dear Owner", or the best.. "Dear Friend". Good post guy.

How about Dear Mr.?

=P

you gotta love when you get one of these:

Dear {$recipients_name},

At a marketing blog I follow, a recent post addressed the topic of sponsorship i.e. brand placement in exchange for product or cash. The NUMBER ONE suggestion from the author: "Take the time to know who you are sending your proposal to. For the first couple of years I worked here I considered changing my name to Whom It May Concern Wiedemann."

Dear sir, is actually quite a polite way to start a letter. A lot of UK or foreign customers (any country where the vile familiarity Americans take for granted doesn't reign).

Aaron, you've got to learn to delegate.

In general, you should at this point have some kind of assistant (permanent) who receives the mail from your really public addresses (you can have an email which you give out to your correspondents and don't post on the web). This person would pass on all the relevant to you stuff and deal with SEO Book charity demands, etc.

That would give you a whole lot more time for the serious stuff you have on your plate at this point. Not only are you a prominent SEO expert (lots of daily research and thinking there as we all know) but you have at least two major sites to keep up and running as well as hands in lots more joint projects.

Dear Sir,

We at Awesome Design 2000 ( http://www.geocities.com/awesomedesign2000 ) understand and would like to extend our condoloences in this regard.

AD2K
;)