If you haven't ingrained this habit yet you are missing out on heaps of $$$!

And spam issues aside, email marketing is still a killer application. Teamed up with SMS, it is very hard to beat for price.

Let's see how really switched on businesses use both to make a motzah.

The original email/SMS system was created around 5 years ago to service dance party market in Southern California. Then, ravers had to stay one step ahead of authorities, so party notifications were very time sensitive, often being just a couple of hours before start time.

Email and SMS was used from one database.

Fast forward to now, and Murgent.com.au is to my knowledge still only bundled email/sms provider that can construct campaigns using a common (web based) database.

Here are some applications to get juices flowing.

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Say you operate a restaurant. You have been diligently collecting names and contact details for your VIP Club.

Tonight looks like it's going to be a bit slow. It's 3:00 pm on Tuesday afternoon. You go to computer and create an SMS message "Special VIP deal, tonight only, book by 6:00 or miss out - every booking gets a free bottle of wine worth $20. Go on, give her a surprise."

You create a list of 50 VIP's and send message out. As long as their mobile phone is on, they will get note within 30 seconds of send. It will be delivered, because network guarantees delivery.

By 5:00 you are booked out. Cost?

5 minutes of your time, $6.75 for 50 SMS messages, plus wholesale cost of each bottle of wine.

In order to determine whether senders are “good” or “bad”, organizations must have ability to accurately identify sender of an email. Spammers and their ilk would prefer to hide their identities – especially for those that are engaged in open fraud such as phishing attacks. They modify email headers in an attempt to fool recipients into thinking email is coming from a legitimate source. This practice, called “spoofing”, is a common tactic used by spammers to obfuscate their true identities.

To confront this issue, Microsoft, CipherTrust and other industry leaders have worked to create standards that allow organizations to determine whether an email is coming from a legitimate sender. To date, there continues to be debate as to which technology will prevail. Microsoft’s Caller ID (now dubbed Sender ID Framework or SIDF) has emerged as a front-runner along with Meng Weng’s Sender Policy Framework (SPF) .

Unfortunately, merely knowing who is sending an email doesn’t necessarily stop spam. As it turns out, spammers have been early adopters of new standards, they are better about applying for sender authentication technologies than normal corporations, and they are eager to participate!

Regardless of how many spammers adopt “honest” emailing practices, technology to identify email senders is quickly being adopted by major ISPs and corporations. Armed with that knowledge, reputation-based filtering can have a significant impact on level of spam in everyone’s inbox.

There are a number of methods companies use to determine whether a given email sender has a “good” reputation. Some of most common tactics are:

By far most costly method in terms of human resources, In-house lists require IT staff to maintain whitelists and blacklists in order to cut down on spam problem. The difficulty with these programs is that they require that IT staff become knowledgeable about a host of email security and spam issues, and investment is rarely sufficient to overcome thousands of variations of nuisances and threats posed by spammers, phishers, and other dubious email senders. By time administrator becomes aware of a new spam attack, spam has already gotten onto network, and into users inboxes.