Sending Commercial EmailWritten by Dawn Gray
With more and more court rulings on commercial email, it is becoming difficult to send people information via email without being labelled a spammer. So, how can a small business owner get their message out (via email) without losing their ISP and receiving tons of hate mail (often including malicious programs called "bombs")?You have two choices: 1. spend a lot of money; or 2. spend a lot of time and effort. Spend A Lot Of Money Yes, there are cheap email lists available online. However, chances are those lists are compiled of email addresses collected from websites or directories. It's unlikely that owner of list has recipient's permission to send them anything. There are also lists out there compiled of people who requested information. Some offer bonuses for receiving, reading or responding to advertisements. That may be a good strategy from list owner's perspective, but you're likely to receive a lot of responses from people who have no interest in your product. That translates into wasted time and energy on your part, as you try to follow up on those bogus leads. If you want to send email messages to a lot of people, I highly recommend sticking to dependable lists of people who requested information. YesMail and Postmaster Direct are two biggest companies which offer opt-in email lists. They offer many ways to target your market, as well as legitimately obtained addresses. Spend A Lot Of Time And Effort If you can't afford to work with big boys, you can compile your own list. See my article, "How to Capture Email Addresses" at http://www.busymarketing.com/email.shtml Compiling your own list will involve first promoting your website by other methods. (I've got a lot of ideas at http://www.busymarketing.com/marketing.shtml and in my E-Books - see newest one, "106 Website Promotion Tips" at http://www.busymarketing.com/106tips.shtml ) Then you must convince people to send you their email addresses by offering an announcement list, newsletter, freebie, or contest.
| | The Two Outlooks for EmailWritten by Dilip Dahanukar
Most of us have both Outlook programs on our computer: Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. On face of it, both look more-or-less same, and few of us actually take trouble to find out their plus and minus points. But I did examine both of them carefully with surprising results, and I would like to share my findings with you. You will certainly be able to get more out of both of them with this information. Recently my Norton Anti-Virus (NAV) detected a virus coming through email. This happened as my preview pane was open in Inbox and it opened virus email automatically as soon as it was downloaded. The NAV could not repair file so I had to delete infected file. I found to my utter horror that deleting file disabled my browser. It also disabled my CD writer. I had to save my data using Iomega 250MB zip drive which fortunately worked but only in slow SAFE mode of Windows! Ultimately I had to Quick Restore my Compaq computer. It took me 2 days to reload various programs and data! This could have been avoided if I had taken a few simple precautions. I have written out these precautions towards end of this article. Differences between two Outlooks: 1.Outlook Express (OE in short) comes with Internet Explorer browser, whereas MS Outlook (MSO in short) is a part of MS OFFICE. 2.OE can download news from newsgroups. MSO cannot. 3.OE uses "identities" to configure mail account. Identities allow multiple people to use OE without sharing a common inbox. The messages are saved separately for each identity. When you input your identity it opens a full and separate OE program. When you switch identities, program is closed (exited), and again a full and separate OE program is opened. This feature allows multiple users to have their own password-protected email program on one single computer. This feature is not available with MSO. 4.MSO has IPM features such as calendar, tasks and notes. These features are not present in OE. 5.MSO can activate feature "don't download messages larger than - ---KB" Sets a maximum size for messages that will be downloaded. Large messages can take a long time to download and can increase your connection time. If you use a local area network (LAN), this setting is ignored. It's a shame that setting is ignored for LAN. I find this is very useful to firewall virus file attachments, which are usually above 100KB in size. 6.In MSO as well as OE, you can select all messages in a folder by opening folder and clicking Select All from Edit menu. But its only in MSO that you can do a Save As. With more than one message selected, Save As feature is de-activated in OE. Thus when you Save As in MSO, you can save all messages in folder in one text file. This not only makes it quick to save messages, but they can then be opened in notepad, WordPad or MS Word, which all have find or search feature which makes locating of any message a very simple task 7.MSO can use any of MS OFFICE formats to New Send mail. MS OFFICE Access, Power Point, Excel, or Word. This is not possible with OE.
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