Spam Blocking Information |
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How to Avoid Spam Complaints in Your Emails
Spam filters are responsible for deleting a high percentage of legitimate business emails from people who have no wish to spam. Here are some tips to avoid spam complaints in your emails or ezine. Avoid the following triggers in your emails. 1. Excessive use of ALL CAPITALS in the subject line and body of your email. 2. The use of words like "free"(used alone or in combination with words like "trial","money", "quote", "sample", "membership", "access" etc.) Other more obvious word to avoid include "sex", "XXX","spam", "$$$", "checks", "money", "extra income", "as seen on TV". Even seemingly harmless word such as "search engine listings", "cable converter", and "reverses aging" will get you in trouble. 3. Excessive use of exclamation marks "!!!" Tips for Staying on the Right Side of Spam Filters 1. Use words like "news", "newsletter", "list" in your subject line. 2. Say how often your ezine is published in the subject line - weekly, monthly. 3. Put date of newsletter in subject line. 4. Put issue number in the subject line. 5. Ensure your newsletter is a proper ezine with some substance in the text. To help identify spam in your emails/ezines use the following spam checker always before you send anything out. http://www.merchant-account-service.com/stop_spam_mail.html Above all, use your common sense. We know what spam looks like, so avoid anything that resembles it in your ezine. (C) John Lynch Learn how to Make Money Online by subscribing to Free 6-part 'Internet Marketing Explained' mini course. Get 6 free Internet Marketing E-books; free autoresponder; and free trial top-notch website. http://www.merchant-account-service.com/internet_marketing_explained.html)
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Spasms & Spamocidal Mania Below is a letter I wrote to the following organizations: Dealing With SPAM - An E-mail Address Strategy With SPAM being such a problem it might seem the right thing to do is never give anyone your email address. As a strategy that's not bad but it misses one rather important point; the purpose of having an email address is to be able to exchange emails, both with friends and also as a means to receive eZines from online forums and information sites. In theory any one of these sources could share your email address with a spammer (perhaps by listing it on a public site) and before you know it your email box is full of emails you don't want and can't stop... note, we do not do this, your address is safe with us. Therefore what you need would seem to be a list of separate email addresses, all of which are yours, that you allocate out to the different email lists and online forums you have. That way if one of the addresses gets picked up by the spammers you can just drop and block that one address (and perhaps the list it was subscribed to) and continue in your low or no-SPAM world. So how do we do this? What we're going to do is use one "real" email account (ideally with a hard to guess name) and then a set of forwarded email addresses, all of which are different, but all point back to the real email address. Typically your ISP (Internet Service Provider) provides a small number of email-boxes for you (normally called "POP3" mailboxes). Choose one of these to be your "real" email address and point your email client to it (follow the instruction in your email client such as Outlook Express and ISP to do this). Then we need to register a domain name which will allow us to have lots of forwarded email addresses. 123-Reg.com are an example of a company that provides an inexpensive high-quality service to do this, so we'll use them as an example. Create an account, it's free to do this, and give them your real email address. Then you should register a domain name with them; obviously you need to think of a domain name which you would like as part of your "public face." Choosing a name you like can take a little thought, but don't take too long, domain names are being registered at the rate of one every two seconds, so get in to secure yours as soon as you can! The cost is very low, with .uk domains at around UK�3 / US$5 per year and .com/.net around UK�9 / US$15 per year (note, you should register for at least two years). Using the email forwarding option from the 123-reg.com control panel, set the catch-all address as your real email address. Then any emails sent to any name at your domain will be forwarded on to you automatically. Here's a worked example for Brenda Wyatt. Brenda's ISP supplied POP3 email address is [email protected] She creates an account at 123-reg.com and registers the domain "WyattMail.net" She sets up email forwarding via the 123-reg control panel to forward all emails received to @wyattmail.net to [email protected]. Now when Brenda signs up to a forum or email list she gives an email address which is individual to that list. Let's say she registers with Amazon, she could register as '[email protected]'. They will send emails to that address which will be forwarded to her [email protected] email address and she can read them as she wishes. The nice thing about this system is that Brenda hasn't had to go anywhere else to register the email address '[email protected]', 123-reg just sees the wyattemail.net part and sends it on for her. So what happens if she finds one of her email addresses is being targeted by spammers? Let's assume this happens to her "[email protected]" email address. She then goes to 123-reg.com, logs in and goes to the control panel. She selects the email forwarding page, adds a fresh line with '[email protected]' in it, clicks the 'return to sender' checkbox and clicks 'update'. Now any email to this address will be returned to whence it came. Nice, eh? �2005 Paul Quirk & Mark Quirk. Article taken from CareOfWindowsXP.com. The Business Of Sending Spam You all tear your hair out in frustration every time you see your inbox crammed full of spam again. Have you ever stopped and asked yourself where you get so much spam? This isn't to suggest that spam is your fault but... if everybody hates spam so much then... why is there so much of it? Are You A Spam Zombie? Over the past few years you've all become familiar with the terms spam, spam filter, whitelists, blacklists and a whole myriad of other terminology associated with the problem of spam. You now have to add a new and extremely worrying phrase to that list - spam zombie. Block Spam with An Easy Behavioral Change E-mails now have a connection back to their servers. I will leave the technical aspects out of this article. Instead, I will walk you through how information from your computer is getting back to them. Managing Spam in 2005 In 1998, nearly 10% of all email traffic on the internet was SPAM. By 2003 that number had climbed to 50%, and the problem had gotten so bad that Congress passed the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) The 4 Ws of Junk E-mail Junk e-mail or spam has become the scourge of the modern computer world. It eats bandwidth. Spam is like a disease. It doesn't care about age, religion, wealth. It doesn't discriminate. Junk e-mail affects us all. Three Faces of SPAM Like everybody who will ever read this, I get spam in my e-mail. Mine seems to fall into one of three categories. The first is the Nigerian scam about helping some poor, pathetic soul collect megabucks, supposedly from someone who has died and left a fortune. I'm not sure what is worse: that there are people desperate enough to believe those messages, or that there are people despicable enough to prey on the desperate. The net result is the despicable con the desperate into sending money which the desperate will never see again. Pst... Pass It On... I Found Out Its a Hoax When you receive an email telling you about a virus, what do you do with it? Do you send it to everyone in your address book to help them protect themselves too? All About Spam Spam is annoying. Period. Why people would want to send all of us stupid messages about buying prescription drugs or getting some outrageously good mortgage rate is beyond me. Well, not really. Learn Simple Strategies That Will Stop Spammers From Bombarding Your Inbox! Spam filter is the solution that most people resort when they try to steam the flood of junk mails and spam. Kill The Messenger (Service) You are familiar with the software applications that you run on your computer, but you may not be familiar with the dozens of programs running in the background on your computer. These programs, called "services" handle tasks like event logging, spooling files to the printer, and networking. One of these services, the Messenger Service, can be reconnoitered by spammers. Why Your ISP Takes Bribes From Spammers The lifeblood of the spammer is email. They need to be able to send lots of it on an ongoing basis to stay in "business". High profile spammers can send 80 million pieces of junk email every single day. Yes one single person. Spam: The Tasteless Internet Meat of Criminals Spam. You've all heard of the crazy pink meat in a can, but what's it got to do with the Internet? Well, it's also the namesake for a major problem in the World Wide Web-unsolicited junk email. Problem! We're talking serious pain in the butt both as a waster of time, space, and money. It is estimated that around half of all email received on the Internet is this sneaky illegal attempt at selling fake consumer goods, pornography, and a whole plethora of 'helpful' services. It's taking up half of all email on the Earth, and it's costing businesses' billions in wasted time, as well as filling personal email accounts to the limit so important messages aren't received. It seems everywhere there's a leap in technology for humanity, there's also a group of people who want to stretch the realm of criminal activity to another level. How To Identify Spam Most of us have opened our email program and found, alongside correspondence from people that we know, offers for products from commercial web sites. Some of these emails we expect. We have asked to be notified of sales and other opportunities or joined a mailing list offered by the company. Demand for Spam? It exists Do you like spam? No, I'm not kidding. Everybody knows what spam is, almost everybody seems to have learned by heart simple advice like "do not click ?" "do not respond?" , "do not buy?" but-- How Spammers Fool Spam Blacklists - And How to Stop Them Effectively stopping spam over the long-term requires much more than blocking individual IP addresses and creating rules based on keywords that spammers typically use. The increasing sophistication of spam tools coupled with the increasing number of spammers in the wild has created a hyper-evolution in the variety and volume of spam. The old ways of blocking the bad guys just don't work anymore. Bayesian Spam Filters Explained In a word Bayesian spam filters are "intelligent". Bayesian spam filters are intelligent in so far as they're capable of comparing two sets of information and acting on the result. This is in direct contrast to the vast majority of other spam filters who use pre-built rules to decide which e-mail is spam and which is not. E-mail SPAM: Whats The Big Deal? It absolutely amazes me how many people over-react to receiving e-mail SPAM. Internet Theft and Fraud My friends in the web hosting business have recently informed me that the big problem this year (2004) is security and fraud. I have read that currently the F.B.I. receives over 9,000 complaints per month pertaining to bogus email and websites. Why is this happening? Are just a few 'bad apples' doing it, or is it the result of a lopsided world economy where the underprivileged are finally striking back like the infamous Robin Hood? Whatever your moral view, I've got the strange feeling it stems from a growing unconscious greed in the social consciousness of modern society. People worship money, not spirituality or love. Am I wrong? |
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