|
|
| Spam Blocking Information |
|
|
|
|
Im Guilty Until Proven Innocent
No doubt about it. "Spam" (unsolicited commercial email) threatens to paralyze and ultimately destroy the email system as it currently exists on the Internet. Anyone with an email address can attest to the fact that the avalanche of Spam has only increased in the last year and shows no sign of stopping. However, the current system many Internet Service Providers (ISP's) use to deal with Spam may just destroy the Internet's email system long before the spammers do. Now, I won't deny that the weight of the Spam on any ISP's resources can rate very significant. It's been estimated that between 30-60% of all email now sent is Spam! This means that 30-60% an ISP's system resources (bandwidth, hardware, system maintenance) go towards delivering messages nobody wants to receive. Out of self-defense, many ISP's turn to third party services like SpamCop, SPEWS (Spam Prevention Early Warning System), and SpamHaus to help them identify sources of spam and block the messages before their email systems get clogged. No Trial - No Defense - Guilty! In theory, it's a great system. In practice, it creates a situation resembling a witch hunt where the accused gets burned at the stake without a trial, let alone the ability to face their accuser. Here's how the system works. Let's say a business habitually sends legitimate email to its customers or prospects who asked to receive the email. As long as nobody complains, life proceeds as normal. But then let's say one of those people forgets they opted in to the business's email list and reports an email message as spam to one of the services I mentioned above. Result: the business gets blacklisted by one or more of these services and ISP's in turn automatically block email (legitimate email) sent by the business to its customers and opt-in subscribers. To make matters even worse, nobody at these anti-spam services bothers to let the business know they've been blacklisted. When the business finally discovers their status and tries to contact SpamCop, SPEWS or SpamHaus, the real fun begins. If the business does discover which service(s) blacklisted them, they'll find they can't call anyone on the phone to discuss the problem. They also discover these services are totally unregulated and there is no higher court of appeals. Any email responses from these services often contain a smug attitude of assumed guilt that scoffs at your claims of innocence. Also, don't bother asking for the opportunity to face your accuser in order to prove your innocence because they get to hide behind a cloak of anonymity. Combining this attitude of assumed guilt with the inability to prove your innocence creates a recipe for disaster for every legitimate business. Oh, by the way, while writing this article, I received 19 spam email messages through an ISP monitored by all 3 anti-spam services. Makes you wonder, doesn't it? In the end, the current system only creates opportunity for abuse that targets legitimate businesses while the real spammers just merrily keep sending their flood of email. (c) Jim Edwards - All Rights reserved - http://www.thenetreporter.com Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist and the co-author of an amazing new ebook that will teach you how to use free articles to quickly drive thousands of targeted visitors to your website or affiliate links... Simple "Traffic Machine" brings Thousands of NEW visitors to your website for weeks, even months... without spending a dime on advertising! Turn Words Into Traffic
|
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
Edating Readers One of our Australian clients sent out a campaign using a list which had been complied manually. Get Your News Releases Through the Spam Filters in 11 Easy Steps In today's spam-filled email world, it's sometimes VERY difficult to get your news releases and PR pitches to the media person you are trying to reach. These tips hold true for personal emails, too, so even if you don't do P.R., this article offers some important email tips. The Anti Spam Challenge ? Minimizing False Positives Email is the quintessential business communication tool, so when it doesn't work like it's supposed to, business suffers. Anti spam software is designed to protect your inbox from unwanted messages, but unless your system is properly trained even the best software misses the mark and flags legitimate messages as spam. These messages are referred to as "false positives." CAN-SPAM Basics I. BACKGROUND Why Is Spam Such a Problem? Spam can be a lot more damaging than you might think. Obviously, they are the most annoying thing that you can receive through your inbox, but it goes deeper than that. If you are like the millions of other internet email users, you know that sending and receiving email is a free service that comes with your internet service. 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. Quickly Eliminate 100% of Your Junk Email Why do so many people think I need to take Viagra? I guess it's for the same reason others believe I want to re-finance my home, invest in a new stock and sell my business. What to Do to Avoid Getting Banned How would you feel if you found a link on the web that was interesting to you but when you click the link it takes you to a page that is total rubbish? You are not only disappointed but it also wastes your time. Unfortunately, this is often true in many cases. To get a good ranking, often web page designers use "spamdexing". Spamdexing search engines is the practice of deliberately and dishonestly modifying HTML pages to artificially increase the chance of them ranking close to the top of search engine results. This spamming could result in your site getting banned from search engine indices. Wiki Reek-y Havoc The Vandals are coming! And this time they're after your wallets. 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. Spam - How to Report it I'm sure you find spam just as frustrating and annoying as I do. So I've done some investigation in how to report it to get these people hopefully in a bit of strife! And put spam to an end or at least lessen it ;-) Do Not Spam The temptation among internet marketers to SPAM is greater than ever. By now, most people know that SPAM isn't the popular food from Hormel but a pseudonym for "unsolicited commercial email," also known as UCE. A Practical Approach to Eliminate Spam Spam is out of control! I guess that would be the understatement of the year. Like any other annoying fact of life, you let it drive you crazy or you deal with it. Dont Give the Spammers Your Address From Your Page Spammers get email addresses from web pages using programs called spiders which tour the internet capturing letter strings with the "@" character in it. Junk Mail Works! Junk mail works. Why does it work? How does it work? 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. Challenge Response Spam Filters Explained As the flood of spam increases end users are looking for new and more efficient solutions to block spam. In turn software developers are knocking themselves out trying to come up with the killer app that will stop spam forever. BUSTED: Anti Spam Forces Bankrupt Super-Spammer Scott Richter Microsoft scores one for the good guys 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) How Spammers Fool Rule-based and Signature-Based Spam Filters 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.
|
| home | site map |
| © 2005 |