Government, Politics and the Economy
Partisan Lines Forming Over Healthcare Reform
The top Senate Democrats and President Obama appear aligned in support of a government-run health insurance option, facing off against Senate Republicans who say they refuse to won't back such a measure. WashingtonTimes.com
New Bill Could Help Merchants with Credit Card Costs
Under a new bill before the House of Representatives, merchants would be able to negotiate with banks to reduce the costs associated with credit card purchases. Reuters.com
By Charles M Cooper · June 05 2009
small business brief, marketing, small business, economy
Like all great events, I remember the day I learned that spam was, if not dead, gravely wounded. It was November 17th, 2008. The story was that an investigation by internet service providers (ISPs) Hurricane Electric and Global Crossing into McColo, a notorious hosting service responsible for housing as many as 70% of the spam email operations on the Web, led to the plug being pulled on McColo’s operations by their ISPs.
The end of McColo killed 70% of the spam on the Web, but as predicted, the spammers are back.
Gourmet Spam
You would have to imagine that the death of McColo last November was a serious wake-up call to the spam industry—yes, there really is such a thing—and you would be right. While the experts are still working on where all this is coming from now, that is less important than the changes that the spam has undergone. It is more sophisticated and better designed than before. According to Dermot Harnett, principal anal...
By Charles M Cooper · January 29 2009
email, spam, malware, email marketing
Government and Economy
Obama Argues for Stimulus Before House
Expecting easy House approval of an $816 billion stimulus plan, President Obama said the nation is at a "perilous moment" that requires swift and decisive action from government.
Fed to Use Every Tool to Help Economy
The Federal Reserve has signaled that it will continue with the “unconventional tools” they have used so far to cushion the pain of the recession, including keeping interest rates at record lows.
By Charles M Cooper · January 28 2009
small business brief, marketing, small business, economy
Those who have followed my meanderings over the last year know that I have a special place in my heart—not to mention a very special place in Hell—for Internet scammers. Most of the time, their poorly-worded little bombshells are caught by my spam filters, but sometimes they manage to worm their way through into the actual Inbox. I received the following over the past couple of days so I thought I would share them with you. They are not all by any means, but they are quite representative. There are the mundane, the cleaver and one—my personal favorite—that should have every Soldier, Marine, Sailor and Airman in this country’s armed forces sufficiently ticked off to hunt them down. One word of warning: Do not click on any links in the following examples. I have left them active so you can mouse-over them and see that they are, in fact, fakes. So, without further a due, enter the scammers!
The Bank Scam...
By Charles M Cooper · January 22 2009
scams, spam, fraud, trojan horses
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
