Email Email and Oh Yeah - EmailWritten by Christopher
You can hire a web designer to create a web page newsletter complete with Sales message for your widgets, then all you need to do is send it out to thousands of email addresses, and you can make millions overnight right?Er, wrong! So, you have this fantastic advertisment, and you have to send it out to every nut with a PC. Yep, well you can do that, but I’d seriously reconsider that action. For starters this campaign will be untargeted, and most will hit delete button as they didn’t request it in first place – and you aren’t going to make any money by annoying anyone. You really have to be careful when sending out those mails, because one mistake, one tiny little error with your etiquette, and bye bye to any first contact and chance of doing business. You see an inbox is a very personal thing, most keep only 1 box, and this is for both their business correspondence and personal mail. They should get a separate box for spam type stuff – then use spam address in those silly, naff places in net – but they DON’T. Just place yourself in their shoes for one moment, your sitting there, and suddenly ding dong!!!!! You have 2 of same email arrive, selling some sexual product you no way on earth asked for, so you delete it and hope it never comes back, but it does. It’s irritating right. You could reply, but by replying you are giving them your address, then again it may have just been a simple send error by them – so you don’t unsubscribe after all. I mean what’s harm, it’s only 2 emails okay…… Now multiply that by 20 every week. 40 spam emails every week (and that’s nothing!) that you spend time deleting, blocking and unsubscribing from. Phew! So what’s answer, increase anti spam laws, go to trouble of changing that email address again etc. I don’t think there is one, net is too big to control something like this. It’s a case of put up with it, and block what you can coming through. It’s not just junk that fills an inbox. Mistakes have a lot to answer for, but you can stop sending it yourself, and preventing some of damage being done. We all accidently spam people. What! Yes, we do actually. All you need to do is hold down that send button twice oops, I just sent spam. So be careful when you are tap tap tapping away. But what is spam? No – it’s not that sickly luncheon meat stuff. Spam is unwanted mail. Er, but word is so overused, mainly as I think people don’t bother thinking before they speak, and if they’ve had a bad day or had a lot of recent spam – they’ll just label everything as SPAM, it’s a frustration thing lol.
| | Spam Filters & Blockers: The solution to unsolicited email?Written by Anti Spam League
Spam is a term that, for vast majority of us, has a very negative connotation. How could it be different when average Internet user gets over 50 pieces of junk email per day? Moreover, research indicates that by 2006 average internet user can expect to receive at least 5,000 pieces of spam per year. That sure is a giant amount of spam!None of us want to waste our time, our bandwidth and our hard drive space to receive spam and then delete it. Because our day-to-day lives are delayed, interrupted and significantly disturbed by this large number of unsolicited email, software manufacturers have developed a number of products especially designed to fight spam. These products might be called ‘spam filters’, ‘anti spam filters’, ‘e-mail filters’, ‘spam blockers’ and even ‘spam killers’. Regardless of name, their purpose remains same: to eliminate spam in your inbox. We have not yet seen a spam filter that achieves 100% accuracy but latest products launched into market as well as newest versions of existing products are proving to be more and more successful. In case you are wondering specifically what these products do and how they do it, you should know that a spam filter is a program that - web based, server based or installed locally - prevents spam email from being downloaded to your PC. The spam filter itself operates on basis of rules, which means that spam fighting program will examine your incoming email and match it against a set of pre-defined criteria. If email does not match those rules, then it is either: a) Deleted, or b) Quarantined for Review. There are three basic types of traditional anti-spam software: 1) Plug-ins for email clients - These anti spam programs run on your computer and require all received spam to be downloaded before they start sorting it. 2) Standalone applications - These spam blockers also run on your computer and communicate with email server multiple times each hour to check your POP mailbox for spam and delete it. They constantly run in background, using up resources and bandwidth. 3) Server-based email spam filters - Many ISPs and email servers (Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, etc.) have installed email filtering software that scans email for certain triggers, which may include certain phrases, formatting, and aggressive writing styles. A server based spam filter is designed to examine email being sent to your Internet Service Provider or local area network and to filter it effectively before email is delivered to you. When this works, it works effectively, however it is not perfect. Unfortunately, many unfair marketers have learned to fool spam filters while a lot of legitimate emails are blocked by them. Of spam filters that are on market at moment vast majority of them need to be installed to your hard drive. However, there is a move towards spam filters that do all work online before email ever gets to your computer. Most of today’s email applications come with a basic spam filter that allows you to block email from specific addresses. Some more complicated email software allows you to configure rules just for that software itself. This can get pretty complex pretty quickly! But people who suffer from tons of spam want a simple solution to their problem - not more headaches. On this note, one of most popular PC-based spam solutions on market today is Mailwasher Pro, which has a really nice feature that allows you to send a reply to spammer that mimics a ‘mailer daemon’ error message; that is, when spammer gets this message from you he assumes your email address no longer exists. Simple but effective.
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