Archive for the ‘Spam’ Category

O.K., before I get into any trouble, what I am about to teach you does not break any spam laws. This is a completely legit way of inviting people to learn about you and your business, and it is also a very creative way of doing so. If you do this the right way, people will actually thank you for what you have to offer them. But with the pros come the cons: if you do this the wrong way, then you can seriously damage your own reputation as well as the reputation of your business, and this is because if you do this the wrong way, people will view you as a SPAMMER.

This whole concept of “legal spam” stems from the idea of inviting people to get to know you as a friend. This is made possible in today’s online world through the growing popularity of social networking websites. You are going to be able to “legally spam people” by actually becoming a more social person, instead of a hungry businessman just looking for the sale. You will contribute to the better good of our online community by sharing your expertise with others. You are going to initially share your expertise for free, and naturally, people are going to want more. Lucky for you, you will then have an opportunity to sell to these new found friends of yours.

Out of all of the social networking sites on the web right now, MySpace and FaceBook are your easiest ways to target a market and start growing your list of friends. I personally find that doing this on MySpace is much easier to do, but I have also dabbled with FaceBook and found some success.

Here’s a quick explanation of how you would “legally spam” people on MySpace: You will first need to create a “normal” MySpace account. You can mention your businesses, but you want to keep the focus on yourself as a real person. You will want to tell your own personal stories, put up pictures of yourself, and include interesting facts about yourself. Believe it or not, many people like to get to know a person before they do business with them.

After creating your MySpace page, you will then need two important things in order to successfully accomplish your MySpace marketing: a target market, and an “offer.” Depending on what you have to sell, you will need to search the MySpace groups, blogs, and friends of “important” people in order to invite people in your target market as your friends. There is software that you can use for free that will automatically allow you to invite friends within your target market. I suggest inviting no more than 100 friends per day on MySpace because if you invite too many friends, then MySpace will think that you are a real spammer and will shut down your account. But, with the “offer” that you are about to create, you will see how what you are doing won’t be viewed as spam to many of the people that you extend a friend invitation to.

So, here it is, the all important offer. You are going to need to craft the perfect offer (reason) for people to want to be friends with you. I enjoy inviting people in a target market to contribute to a blog. For example, if I was targeting people who want to save money on groceries, then I would tell people that I have a blog in which I talk about great grocery deals and even some grocery items that they can get for free. I would say something to the effect of “Hey! Let’s be friends and when you find great grocery deals, add that deal to the blog. Before we know it, we will have our own little community of grocery savers!” In some of my blog posts I could then mention additional free resources that I offer on my website. When they click from my MySpace page or blog to my website, then that is 100% free traffic.

Other examples of great offers could include: Offering a free mini course or free eBook to everyone who becomes your friend on MySpace, sharing informative videos for free with your target market on your MySpace page, or you could even just say something like, “Let’s be friends and we can occasionally swap ideas with each other.” Before you know it, you will be driving free traffic and obtaining free leads for your business, because you have learned how to “spam” or approach people the right way.

About the Author

Daniel Pereira is an expert at driving free traffic to your website. For 2 free eBooks, free weekly conference calls, and a free mini course, just head on over to www.TheFreeTrafficFormula.com . You can also visit “The Free Traffic Blog” at www.TheFreeTrafficFormula.com/blog

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Nowadays, many of us receive e-mail invitations to join social networking websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace. These services make it easy for members to send out invitation emails complete with response links, and it is in their best interests to do so – as more friends sign up, these sites register higher visits and page views, potentially leading to increased advertising income.

While only a few well-known social networking sites used to exist, this number has skyrocketed, resulting in many more invitations in your e-mail Inbox. Even if you know the sender and name of a social network to which you’ve been invited, before you click on an invitation response link, take a second and consider that not all invitation e-mails are what they seem. Some fraudulent “friends” and “social networks” could have drastic consequences to your security and privacy:

1) Make sure the invite link actually goes to the social network website and not somewhere else trying to “phish” for your personal information! It ‘s better to copy and paste URLs into your web browser instead of clicking invite links, as there are many sneaky tricks to hide the true web addresses in e-mail messages.

Even when you copy and paste URLs into a web browser, before actually visiting the websites, look in the browser ‘s address bar for any text such as “redirect” or “goto”. These may be signs of someone trying to redirect you to a nefarious website.

For example, imagine getting the following link inside an e-mail message for a hypothetical “Google Social Networking Service”:

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=stopbadware.org&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=es&tl=en

Since the e-mail claims to be from “Google”, and the web address contains “google.com”, this will take you to a page on Google ‘s website, right? If you visit the above link you will go somewhere else…

This misdirection link was just an example and fairly easy to detect. Real spam e-mails use lots of other tricks for obfuscating (hiding) true web addresses. Instead of copying and pasting links, it may prove even safer to just visit website homepages directly, skipping invitation links, and then asking senders to be re-invited as their friend.

2) Do you know the person sending the invite? Do you know the name of the social networking site? If you’ve never heard of neither, there ‘s a high probability the site or the member is spamming. Sign up to the site and be placed on the user ‘s “friend” list and your mailbox may be subjected to all sorts of unsolicited e-mail.

Just as responding to junk e-mail alerts spambots that your e-mail address is active, responding to junk social networking requests does the same thing.

If you do know the friend but not the social networking site, what ‘s wrong with sending a quick e-mail to your friend and asking them if their invite was legitimate? If it was, no big deal, but if it wasn’t, you might have alerted your friend to a problem they need to fix on their end.

3) Nefarious websites may be breeding grounds for spyware distribution. Visit the website with the wrong browser and/or wrong software installed, and your computer may become infected.

Think your computer, even with antivirus and anti-spyware software installed, cannot be infected? These software packages may be installed on your system, and the wrong version combined with a 0-day exploit (a previously-unknown bug that has not been patched) can allow spyware / malware to be installed (this is not an exhaustive list):

Internet Explorer
Macromedia Flash
Mozilla Firefox
Opera
QuickTime for Windows
RealPlayer
Safari
Shockwave
Windows Media Player
… And the list goes on.

4) When you access the social networking website, does it ask questions such as the following during the signup process?

* Social Security Number (a big NO-NO!)

* Name and password to another e-mail account so the site can notify all your contacts to join the social network (or nefarious sites can use your account to send e-mail spam to all your contacts UNDER YOUR NAME!)

* Mother ‘s Maiden Name (while legitimate networks may ask this for a “Security Question”, I would not provide it. This is one type of information miscreants can use to possibly get more information about yourself or sign up for credit or other offers in your name).

* Credit Card or Bank Account Number (unless it ‘s a LEGITIMATE SITE, you know it ‘s not a phishing site, and you’re signing up for subscription/premium services, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER PROVIDE THIS INFORMATION! This can cost you money, time, aggravation, and your credit rating.)

These are just four techniques nefarious social networks and/or members can use to violate your privacy, cost you time and money, and possibly harm your credit rating. While I’m not saying you should never join social networks, just be a little careful when you get invitations. Know who is sending you the invite and the legitimacy of the social network. Confirm the invite and visit the social network ‘s homepage directly. Plus, never provide too much information when signing up. Follow this advice to help increase your safety on the Internet while having fun joining your friends in social networks.

About the Author

Andrew Malek is the owner of the MalekTips computer and technology help website at http://www.malektips.com . MalekTips offers tips and advice to help keep you safe on the Internet, including how to detect e-mail scams, detect and remove spyware, and adjust web browser security settings.

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Ten or fifteen years ago, we didn’t need any fancy anti spam software, we got most of our lottery scams by snail mail. If all that dead paper was not so bad for the environment, I might wish we still did; because the lottery spam that sneaks past my anti spam filter and into my inbox is the pits. At least those Publisher’s Clearing House “You have Already Won!” letters used to be sort of entertaining. They were brightly colored, and even came with fun stickers you could play with or give to your kids. I always enjoyed sticking that big “NO” stop sign sticker you know, the one intended for those who did not include a magazine subscription with their entry on the back of my brother’s head. It was a much more innocent time.

Today’s lottery spam is pretty similar to its low-tech cousin. It begins with that all-exciting email: You’ve won! or, if they’re going for a business like tone, “Regarding Ticket Number 127289-56-8938.” When you click to open it, hands shaking in excitement, you read:

We at EuroLotto are happy to announce that you are one of the winners of our recent Euro-Asian International Lottery draw, held on 24 June, 2008 in Stockholm, Sweden. Your email address was attached to an entry ticket numbered 123289-56-8938, which is being awarded a prize in the Third Category, in the amount of $1,000,000.

At which point you break out the champagne, hug your husband or wife, and promptly follow the instructions given. You have to pay $500 for processing fees in order to get your prize? Who cares! You’re a millionaire!

Dealing with Lottery Spam

You don’t actually do any of that, do you? You’re smart enough to see the lottery spam that sneaks past your anti-spam filter for what it is: a cheap scam that plays upon our most sacred desires, namely, money. But while you’re probably pretty adept at recognizing most lottery spam (“send to me email for to claim your money” is a pretty obvious indicator, after all), with the bazillion versions of this email out there, there are still a few that might catch you off guard.

Has a “Congratulations, you’ve won!” email sneaked past your server’s anti spam software? First, keep this in mind: if you haven’t bought a ticket for something, you can’t have won anything. Traditional lotteries work when people buy tickets in order to be entered in a drawing for a pool of money. But if nobody buys, where does the pool of money come from? A fifth dimension that’s brimming over with money trees? Probably not.

Remember this: nobody gives anything away for free.

You can also identify lottery spam by examining the email. What kind of email address did the email come from? If it’s a free Yahoo or Hotmail address, you can guarantee that it’s spam; reputable companies do not use free email providers. It’s also spam if it mentions fees anywhere in the email, or requires you to give personal details.

So you’ve used your highly evolved powers of deduction to determine that a particular email is lottery spam. You’ve put away the champagne glasses and put down your checkbook. What’s next? Generally, you should just delete the message. Never reply to it, as this will tell spammers that they’ve hit upon a valid email, and you’ll be overrun with spam. But there is one more thing you can do if you’d like to be a good Samaritan.

While lottery scammers work hard to sneak past even the best anti spam programs, they also depend upon their victims’ ability to email them back in order to ‘obtain their winnings’ (spam-speak for ‘get scammed’). If you report any lottery spam to the free email provider from which it originated, the email provider can pull their account. Try it; it’ll feel great to do your part to stop (or at least slow down) a lottery spam operation; sort of like an anti spam superhero.

Then you really should break out the champagne: you will have earned it.

About the Author

Jesmond Darmanin is a freelance writer whose main interest is in corporate email security, for other related articles visit his business anti spam blog

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Unless you live in a cave –and one without a computer at that– you’re very familiar with the huge time waster that sifting through mountains of email spam can be. And while spam is a huge annoyance for employees and end users everywhere, the real costs for businesses are in time and money and they’re increasing every day. As costs rise, IT people (at SMEs in particular) are desperate for ways to deal with it effectively.

It’s estimated that 100 billion spam emails fly back and forth, dirtying up the internet every day. A lot of these emails end up on in business email boxes, and employees are forced to spend their mornings sifting through mountainous piles of spam. All of which is time they’re spending not working.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Spam Filters

Installing anti-spam filters is really the only effective way to deal with day-to-day spam within a company. These filters work to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, allowing the good emails through and tossing the junk in the trash. They do this by combining several different types of technology and updating almost constantly. And while the highest quality spam filters do provide relief, sifting out about 98% of a company’s spam, they’re still imperfect.

Why? Unfortunately, spam filters occasionally have trouble telling what is wheat and what is chaff (to stretch an already-tired metaphor), and toss some important emails out along with the junk. And while they don’t occur that often, ‘false positives’ can still become a problem for business owners.

One solution to the problem of false positive is adjusting the sensitivity of the company’s spam filters. The way this works is simple: the higher the sensitivity, the more spam is caught. But the higher the sensitivity, the more valid emails will be taken out with the trash. Increasing the sensitivity of spam filters can cost companies a heck of a lot more money than too much spam after all, customers don’t like it when their emails go ignored.

The Direct and Indirect Cost of Anti-Spam Filters

Even one little missed email can get a company in deep water. A law company based out of Colorado, for example, missed an email containing some important information about a court date and ended up missing an important day in court. The cost? They were required to pay all of the fees for the opposing counsel.

How did this happen? To combat spam, the company’s IT department had turned up the sensitivity of their email filters. Apparently, the United States District sounded pretty spammy to these super hyper filters, and it costed this company thousands of dollars in fees. Ouch.

While this is a nice and obvious example of how false positives can lose a company money, in most cases it’s simply not that cut and dried. Most monetary losses aren’t direct; they come from a loss of business and credibility. When an email from a client is gobbled up by the spam filter and a big business deal falls through because the client feels ignored, it takes a lot of work and public relations to get that client back. And sometimes it never happens.

In addition to directly losing a company money, false positives can affect productivity just as much as an overload of spam can. If employees are used to seeing a lot of their important emails get junked, they will have to spend valuable time sifting through their spam folder for genuine emails. How much can that cost? More than you’d think. According to Ferris Research, recovering a genuine email from a spam folder costs an average of $3.50 of that employee’s time. Especially if you don’t experience many false positives, it may not seem like much but in a company of 500 people who have to fish out two emails from their spam folder a month, it adds up to $42,000. Does that sound like an itty-bitty expense to you?

It doesn’t to most other business owners, either. And to reduce the number of false positives –and the amount of business lost– many businesses don’t use any anti-spam filters at all. And while it’s hard to judge them for wanting to prevent a loss of business, going without a spam filter opens them up to all sorts of problems. Taking care of spam is just too important.

Striking a Balance

But how do you deal with spam and reduce false positives at the same time? The best method is to set aside all mail marked as spam into a special folder so that users will have access to it, and can check it often. While this may seem time-consuming, with good anti-spam software it really doesn’t have to be. The better the software is at recognizing obvious spam, the fewer emails will end up in the junk folder.

As spam filters improve, so do spammers. Because of this, spam filters will probably never be 100% effective– the ones that will delete every piece of spam will generally delete a few important emails along with it. And the ones that let all the important stuff though will also let in a bit of junk. But using a good, well-configured anti spam software and integrating it with your email server can really reduce the amount of spam that end users receive, as well as the rate of false positives you experience.

About the Author

Jes Darmanin works at GFI Software: a company that develops the leading anti spam filter for Exchange and other mail servers. More information about GFI MailEssentials – The leading server antispam solution on http://www.gfi.com/mes

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It’s been almost 5 years since the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 went into effect, but don’t think the law has faded by the wayside. Although anti-spammers have referred to the law as the YOU CAN-SPAM Act and are quick to point out shortcomings, the law is the law – and it is being enforced.

Anti-spam organizations as well as the FTC, Internet Service Providers and even popular sites like MySpace are becoming better and better at tracking down and prosecuting spammers.

If you’re doubtful about the legal ramifications of failing to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act, check out some of the sentences and fines that have been handed out to spammers since 2004. Fines have ranged from hundreds of thousands of dollars to hundreds of millions for spammers, and judges are handing out harsh sentences.

- 2006: online pharmacy spammer Christopher Smith was fined $5.3 million dollars as a result of a lawsuit brought by AOL. He received a 30 year sentence for charges that originated with this lawsuit.

- 2007: Jeffrey Kilbride was sentenced to over five years and James Schaffer was sentenced to six years in prison in charges related to porn spamming on AOL. Each was also fined $100,000, ordered to pay AOL $77,500, and had more than $1 million in revenue seized by the U.S. government

- 2007: Min Kim received 30-37 months in prison instead of a default 24-30 month sentence as a direct result of spamming.

- 2007: Todd Moeller was sentenced to 27 months in prison in charges relating to spamming.

- 2008: Edward Davidson was sentenced to 21 months in prison and ordered to pay almost $715,000 in fines for violating the CAN-SPAM Act and evading taxes.

This is just a sampling of some of the high-profile spam-related cases that have made the headlines over the past few years. Anyone who has had to deal with online-pharmacy and porn related spam clogging up their in-boxes is happy to see these criminals receive tough sentences and high fines.

You may not think you have much in common with these deliberate spammers, but if your latest email campaign violated the CAN-SPAM Act, you are guilty of a crime. Ignorance of the law will not help you in court, and you may be just as unpopular as these “bad guys” with your email recipients.

A Fresh Look at Compliance

It is up to every individual and business in the U.S. that relies on email as a form of advertisement or solicitation to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act. Although transactional types of commercial email are excluded from the Act, it is in every business’ best interest to make account update emails or other transactional communications CAN-SPAM compliant.

The only way to be absolutely certain you are complying with the CAN-SPAM law is to read it thoroughly, and keep reviewing it. If you switch marketing companies or embark on a new email campaign strategy, or even if you take on a new marketing or affiliate partner, you must be certain they aren’t violating the CAN-SPAM law, as well.

You can read the CAN-SPAM Act at the FTC website, which is easy to access through any search engine. The Act is straightforward and simple to understand, but if you do have questions, you can contact the FTC and resolve any doubts or issues you may have via their website or telephone.

Whether you are fined or jailed for failing to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act or not, spamming is very bad business. You owe it to your online customers and email recipients to respect their privacy and personal preferences regarding the mail they receive. At the very least, the CAN-SPAM Act will ensure your business isn’t a source of frustration or worse for the Internet community.

About the Author

Download Web Legal Kit today to learn about email compliance measures.

Find out how you can protect your intellectual property with copyrights, trademarks, and patents, including search functions.

http://www.weblegalkit.com

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