Sure, we all know that with the threats it poses, the way it slows down networks and the scams that are often involved, spam is, if not entirely evil, at least heavily shadowed by the Dark Side. We also know that thanks to the stand-up folks at two major ISPs, we are enjoying a pretty profound break in the amount of spam being crammed into our inboxes. Where my Gmail spam filters used to catch over 100 unwanted emails a day, that number is now down to a dozen or so. That is pretty dramatic and thinking about it begs the question: Should the same thing be done with snail-mail and phone solicitation?
Mailman Steve, a Human Spam Filter
The question arises because of a story that came over the transom today. Steve Padgett was a mail carrier living in Raleigh, North Carolina. For a number of health-related reasons, the 58-year old Padgett could not keep up with the demands of the job and so cut corners by not sorting or delivering third-class mail. In fact, postal inspectors...
By Charles M Cooper · November 20 2008
small business, direct mail, spam, junk mail
I am happy to report some good news on the spam front. After several weeks of investigation by the Washington Post, two Internet service providers, Global Crossing and Hurricane Electric, pulled the plug on McColo, a notorious hosting service responsible for housing as many as 70% of the spam email operations on the Web. As reported by the BBC:
"It is an unprecedented drop but will be a temporary outage as the networks move from North America to places where there is less scrutiny," said Jason Steer, a spokesman for Ironport.
The Washington Post has been gathering data on McColo for the past four months and passed the information to its Internet service providers, Global Crossing and Hurricane Electric.
Both decided to pull the plug on the firm on Tuesday.
It is believed that it hosted gangs running botnets - networks of computers that have been taken over by criminals to se...
By Charles M Cooper · November 17 2008
marketing, small business, email, spam
It has long been known that an e-newsletter is a useful addition to your marketing and public relations efforts. They are, after all, a warm, powerful communication medium that encourages a strong, lasting relationship between you and your readers.
There is some new clarity in the world of online newsletters thanks to research coming from the Nielsen Norman Group in their latest report, E-mail Newsletter Usability. They conducted three rounds of user studies with a total of 93 participants in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong and Sweden. The three studies were as follows:
First Study. This study focused on testing e-newsletter usability in terms of subscribing, unsubscribing, and maintaining the user’s account. It was primarily done in a laboratory setting (with other parts being done through phone calls) with researchers observing subjects as they read e-newsletters and tried to subscribe and unsubscribe....
By Charles M Cooper · April 18 2008
marketing, newsletter, spam, email
In the world of e-mail marketing, dancing the fine-line between e-mail and spam can leave you more unsettled than a Michael Flatley DVD played at high speed. What to do, is it spam, is it legitimate? Sometimes it is hard to say but you know that this is a line you don’t want to cross.
E-mail marketing is alive and well in the era of Web 2.0, blogs and streaming video. In fact, reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. Overused and badly abused in the days gone by, e-mail marketing has had to evolve, undergoing some changes to keep it from being labeled Spam.
Spam, we have hated it for years. It is the e-mail equivalent to those annoying commercials that pop-up in the middle of cable TV movies and shows. You are paying to watch these shows, why in the world are you seeing commercials? In fact, one of the chief selling points of cable over free broadcast TV was to be the lack of commercials. The point is that you are also paying for your Internet service, so...
By Charles M Cooper · March 14 2008
email, spam, can-spam
