Think Before You Call It Spam

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Those of us who make our living working primarily online know full well how pervasive the scourge of spam has become. Whether you are an online publisher like me, or just dealing with the hoards of junk emails that come your way everyday you know the problem is real.

But did you know marking that email newsletter as spam is probably not the best way to keep it out of your in box?

In fact you could even be causing problems for other folks by doing that.

Unwanted Newsletters

From a marketing perspective the email newsletter is a wonderful way to reach out to potential clients and keep a recurring contact with past customers. Because the costs per message are incredibly low this is a marketing tool of choice for just about everyone from the solo entrepreneur to the major corporation.

Trouble is, it is usually pretty easy to add email addresses to the mailing list. Because of that it’s easy to get on to mailing lists that we really don’t want to be a part of, whether we unwittingly “agreed” to be on the list at one point or not.

Being bombarded with unwanted email can be frustrating. And the temptation is to just “make it go away” by hitting the “mark as spam” or “junk” button. But you might want to think before you do that and here’s why. Read more

Defensio Promises Competition for Spam Killing Akismet

Spam is the scourge of the internet. Spawn of Satan. Evil incarnate.

It’s bad stuff.

They say something on the order of 90% of all email sent is in fact spam. Blech!

Spam Defined

For those of you who live under an un-technological rock, here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia Spam entry.

Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, mobile phone messaging spam, internet forum spam and junk fax transmissions.

Spamming is economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. Because the barrier to entry is so low, spammers are numerous, and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. Spamming is widely reviled, and has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions.

In other words there is little cost and effectively no adverse consequences to spammers so they continue to flood the planet with their electronic waste, and tie up huge swaths of bandwidth and countless man hours dealing with their mess.

And if you were wondering where the term spam originated, apparently some of the early computer geeks were fans of Monty Python and they saw all that junk as overwhelming things the same way the Spam song did in this skit.

Read more

3 Reasons Why You Should STOP Forwarding Those Emails

I’m not a fan of email forwards. There is so much junk flowing around these days and quite frankly I don’t have time for all that.

It can be addicting, I know. You may not realize it, but there are some very good reasons why you should control yourself from hitting the Forward button, piling in a ton of email addresses in the To field and hitting send.

Before I get to some reasons why email forwards are a bad idea I thought I’d offer some practical help breaking the chains of that particular addiction. Take a listen to this little motivational aid I recorded for just to help you.

Here’s a link for those of you reading this via feed: Stop Forwarding Those Emails!

You all motivated? Great!

Now onto the reasons why you should kick the email forwarding habit. Read more

Reservations for an Especially Hot Place in Hell

As you may have noticed my posting frequency has dipped a bit recently. I’ve got a lot on my plate and am even busier than normal. I’m OK with that.

But there is something I’m not OK with. You might say I have a bone to pick, although my problem is boneless. I suppose you could say I’ve got a beef with the whole thing, but it is more of a pork-food by product thing.

What I’m struggling with is the incredible amount of time I have to fritter away every day to deal with spam.

OK so maybe it is not really all that much time that I’m wasting. The issue is that the time spent because of spam it totally wasted time that I can never get back. Just like those 86 minutes I spent watching Napoleon Dynamite or the 119 minutes I suffered through The Life Aquatic waiting for it to get funny (I mean common! Bill Murray and Owen Wilson should have been funny, right? What happened there?), every minute I spend dealing with spam is one that I can never get back. Read more