Are opt-in email lists still valuable in this SPAM age?

 One of the things that the introduction of blogs has done is to cause an exodus of sorts from email newsletters or ezines to online publishers simply publishing the information on their blogs.

It is not too difficult to realize why online publishers embraced blogs so quickly and enthusiastically. Actually the SPAM monster appeared to be slowly squeezing the life out of their online business. To meet the SPAM challenge most ISPs have set up SPAM filters that are so powerful that they quite often filter out mail that has been requested, especially mail of the massive opt-in kind. This has meant an increasing number of bounces and undeliverable mail.

With the arrival of blogs there was an easy way out of all this anxiety. Ezines could easily be posted on blogs and no ISP SPAM filter would touch it. And what is more the email aspect of feedback was not lost because readers could easily post a comment at the blog. The huge advantage over email here was that one could see another readers comment and quickly support or disagree with it. Blogs have actually revolutionized publishing the way no other tool has in the history of mankind.

So have blogs made email newsletters and opt-in email lists obsolete? The answer is a firm NO. Nothing would be further from the truth. Even when an online publisher delivers their weekly or daily content at a blog, what is the best way of sustaining and growing traffic to the blog?

Actually even with a website, there is no other more effective way of sustaining high traffic than by harvesting email addresses. This is done by offering and email newsletter or an email course of sorts. This builds up a valuable opt-in email list that you can use again and again to direct traffic to your site. You can even sell them something. As internet marketing experts often point out, the money is in the list.

This is the reason why experts advice affiliates to set up their own sites or blogs to play a key role in their efforts to market their affiliate site. This is simply because it is a huge waste to drive so much traffic to your affiliate site and end up having only a tiny fraction signing up for your affiliate program. By driving traffic through your own site, you have an opportunity to harvest emails and build up a huge, valuable targeted opt-in email list that you can still market the very same affiliate program to, later. In fact research has clearly shown that most people buy only after several repeated encounters of the same product or service.

Even with the introduction of the extremely useful blogging tool and the change of business models by many online publishers, opt-in email lists still remain the most valuable online marketing tool.
 Lois S. is a Technical Executive Writer for Website Source, Inc. http://www.websitesource.com. Her established writing skills coupled with experience in the website hosting industry have provided internet professionals with marketing, product and service ideas for many years.


How to make more money from the google adsense ads on your blog Lois S.Numerous bloggers these days are looking to earn extra cash through the google adsense ads that they post at their sites. Actually the spreading of pay-per-click ads by leading search engines in recent times to smaller sites and blogs has had a major impact on the net. Firstly it has helped to improve on the quality of content on sites as webmasters pay much closer attention to their content so as to attract the right kind of high value google adsense ads that will earn them more revenue.

Still one needs to know how to maximize on their google ads revenue. There are a number of things that you will need to do regularly to ensure that you keep earning a good regular income from google.

Check the value of keywords before posting new content

It is not too difficult to insert most keywords in your area of specialization into your article while leaving your article attractive and useful to readers. You may require the services of a writer, but this should not be a problem as online writers are very affordable.

Do not spend money buying a list of valuable keywords, this information is available for free online. Whats more in your initial experimental stage with keywords buying a list will not be a prudent thing to do. One of the reason is that there is no guarantee that your using certain keywords will automatically and quickly attract the desired high value click ads. There is no certainty in these things. However by consistently using high value keywords you will ultimately enjoy a much higher income than somebody who does not.

Here is a useful link for checking keyword values. It is an overture tool but will also give you a very good idea of what their competitors Google charge for the same keywords.

http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/

Write interesting relevant content

Writing interesting, relevant and captivating content for your website or blog will yield many useful benefits that will ultimately impact on your google adsense earnings. To start with, it is a well know fact that the longer you can keep your visitors in your site, the higher the chances of you selling them something. The same is true with clicks the longer you can keep them wandering around your site the higher the chances that they will end up clicking at some of your google ads and thus earn you something. Well written, relevant content will also make cause your visitors to return again, another vital and highly desirable reaction that makes a website successful. It is much easier to attract back a previous visitor than to win over a new one.

Having interesting and relevant copy at your site is the most effective way of attracting visitors and keeping them longer at your site. Interesting content will also cause your visitors to return again and again. All this will have a very positive impact on your google adsense earnings.

Post your content elsewhere

Posting your quality, attractive content elsewhere will increase the number of quality links leading back to your site. This will help build up the traffic to your website which should have a direct bearing on your google earnings. The higher the traffic a site has, the higher the clicks and this means higher earnings.

The position of your adsense ads matters

Do not ignore advice given by google to affiliates on where ads work best. For example posting them on the left is always better than the right because the eye attention will always be caught by the left before the right. Another good place to post ads is at the bottom of the page.
 Lois S. is a Technical Executive Writer for Website Source, Inc. http://www.websitesource.com. Her established writing skills coupled with experience in the website hosting industry have provided internet professionals with marketing, product and service ideas for many years.

Beware Of Spam Withdrawals

Q: I am so sick of all the spam that is sent to my business email address. I spend an hour every morning just trying to sort out the good email from the bad. I know I could just delete it all, but I'm afraid I'll accidentally delete email that might be important to my business. Short of unplugging my computer, what's the best solution for dealing with spam?

A: I feel your pain. I, too, miss the good old days when the only time you'd spend an hour dealing with spam was trying to pry it out of the can.

Due to the nature of my business, I get a lot of unwanted email. I've been working on the Internet since 1995 and my email address has been publicly exposed for most of that time, so I am a spammer's delight. It is no exaggeration to say that I used to receive more than 400 email messages a day. Out of those 400 messages about 10

Tim serves as the president and CEO of three successful technology companies and is the founder of DropshipWholesale.net. Related Links: http://www.prosperityandprofits.comhttp://www.smallbusinessqa.comhttp://www.dropshipwholesale.nethttp://www.30dayblueprint.comhttp://www.timknox.com

Blogging, Spamming and Blog Spam

 C. SchillerThere is a right way and a wrong way to do things...
By Trina L.C. Schiller

Email marketing once proved to be immensely effective, but the greedy and idiotic polluted the well by spamming the planet with everything from weight-loss products to sexual enhancement drugs and beyond. Because of the stench, filters and laws have been created to attempt to fix the problem, but still the Internet is polluted with more and more junk each day. So obviously, filters and legislation are not the solution, for consumers, publishers, or marketers.

Everyone has been left scratching their heads and asking... What do I do to avoid this crap and make the Internet mine again? How do I build my business and promote it without having to deal with email? After all, what's the point in spending money on email advertising campaigns when there is no guarantee that the emails will even reach their destination?

Enter... RSS.
RSS is the perfect communication tool. It's applications far outreach those of email for marketing, publishing and personal communications. RSS is the answer to our communication woes.

Using RSS to create blogs for communicating with customers, affiliates, partners and family is far and away more effective and reliable than email ever was. As a marketing tool, it really packs a punch that email never could. The reason being is that blogs are targets for search engine spiders. They are themselves, a web presence, whereas email never was and never will be.

Just like a web page, search engine spiders hit blog pages and rank them. The difference between the static web page and the RSS feed is that web pages seldom update their content, RSS feeds, by design, are created to be dynamic and provide regularly updated content, in theory, depending on the blog owner of course. This prompts the search engine spiders to revisit and rerank them more often.

For writers, publishers and and anyone else with something to say, RSS has been a godsend. It has provided the answer to the question of what to do now. Blogging has replaced email for those who have become frustrated with dealing with the problems of email publishing and marketing. Publishers can now get their message out to their subscribers without the headaches associated with sending email, or posting static pages to the web. Even publishing an ezine to the Internet as a web page required the sending of email to make readers aware of the newest issue.

As with anything, there is a right way and a wrong way to do things, and blog publishing is no exception. Now that RSS has become the rage for marketing purposes, several people have taken it upon themselves, in the name of the almighty dollar, to pollute this well too. The newest rash of 'RSS tools' have created some issues of ethics and and credibility. With perhaps the honest intention of being search engine optimization tools, or an automated system for fetching content, this batch of stuff has too much potential for misuse. The result of misuse of these types of programs can be devastating. Already some of these programs have been banned from places like Google and Blogharbour because of this potential.

Programs such as these in the hands of the inexperienced, will cause future problems for bloggers down the road. More and more pages generated using these programs will be banned, and getting banned, right out of the gate, for a newbie, would be a sad thing indeed.

The right way to use blogging to increase your search engine presence is to publish good content. Period. Provide useful information to those who are looking for it. Become someone's trusted information provider, and you have a customer for life. Publish keyword rich articles that give the searcher what they are looking for... solutions for problems.

Publish your information regularly. Weekly is good, daily is better. Sending pings and things too often will get you blacklisted too.

And here is where networking comes in... Find content for your blog from article banks, where authors submit their work for reprint. List yourself in databases as one who accepts article submissions. Get to know other authors and publishers and share content with them. Syndicate your blogs in exchange with other bloggers. Watch your world explode with new opportunities.

Automation in business is a good thing, but it has its place. Nothing beats human communication when dealing with people and creating partnerships. Do you want to talk to an autoresponder? No, and I doubt anyone else does either.

Some of the new programs designed for the automation of article collection have legal issues to consider. The biggest being copyright infringement. Not every author wants their work reprinted, or they require control over where their work is displayed. (Which is as it should be.) Without manually seeking your content, you could very well find yourself being served papers for publishing someone else's work without permission.

Plagiarism is another issue. If you don't follow certain rules for reprinting contributory work, you stand to be hounded for plagiarism. Yet another sticky issue.

Some of the new programs mock safelists, or resemble FFA sites. Before long, those types of blog pages will become banned as well. Search engines will figure out a way to block non-informational blog pages, those that carry nothing but links or classifieds. (Is your head sore from hitting that brick wall yet?)

Still, there are other programs designed to post spam to blogs using the comments feature. This is referred to as comment spam. The only solution thus far, to battle comment spam, is to disallow your readers the option of leaving comments. This is a bad thing, because allowing your readers to interact with you is supposed to be one of the benefits of using this form of communication.

The makers of these programs may have had good intentions to start with, but have ultimately created Frankenstein's Monster. Many are stating that their programs are not spam, because they do not involve email. That is a cop out if I ever heard one. Spam is the transmission of unwanted stuff, whether it is sent to your inbox, or your blog, or even the search engines themselves. Search engines want relevant content, not pages of of keywords, or links. So feeding them page after page of nonsense is spam.

Everyone hates spam, except the spammers, so why be a part of something loathed by so many and embraced by a few? Bad business if you ask me.

The only real way to combat these issues is to simply not use the programs themselves. Do your due diligence and create a reputation as a trusted information provider, not a blog bomber, and your business will prosper. Using these programs will ultimately diminish your reputation and your livelihood.

Your customers are looking for information, a solution to a problem. Give that to them, not just endless pages of links. You will achieve your rightful spot in the ranks, and you stand a far better chance for longevity. There are good RSS tools available, you just need to look beneath the sales copy to find them. And if you are new to RSS and blogging, do some research. Find someone who knows, really knows what RSS is and how to use it, and ask some questions. Don't go out and spend buckets of money on something you're not sure how to use, because you could be doing yourself more harm than good.

A few good books to read some solid information on RSS and blogs...
RSS, Blogs and Syndication
http://www.ads-on-q.com/RSS.html
Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS
http://hop.clickbank.net/hop.cgi?trii65/mrktstudy
RSS Advertising Secrets
http://www.ebookadvertising.biz/products/rssad/
Taming The eBeastie
http://www.feedyourhungrymind.com/Taming-the-eBeastie.html

The Trii-Zine Ezine
www.ezines1.com

Trina L.C. Schiller is a professional network marketer, the publisher of the Internet marketing ezine, "Trii-Zine" and owner of http://www.tlcpromotions.net,as well as a founding publisher at http://www.quikonnex.com,and President of http://www.AdsOnQ.com,the Internet's first syndicated advertising agency.
She has also authored the following ebooks:
"Your Beginner's Guide To Syndication" http://www.ads-on-q.com/booksales.html
RSS, Blogs and Syndication... The Facts vs The guruese" http://www.ads-on-q.com/RSS.html

Keywords: blog, blogging, blog spam, spam, spamming, rss, rss feed, rss tool


If You Build It, They Will Come...Adrian Kennelly ...No they won't. On the web, building a web site is not enough. If there are no links to the site anywhere, no-one is going to visit it. The site won't even be listed in any of the search engines without some incoming links. To get traffic, you will need to do some promotion.

Web Directories
The basic part of any promotion campaign, web directories, whist they may not generate much in the way of traffic, will help in your site's search engine ranking. A good list of free, non-reciprocal, search engine friendly directories can be found at http://info.vilesilencer.com.

Pay Per Click Advertising
This is advertising such as PPC Search Engines, like Yahoo!'s Overture, and contextual advertising, like Google's AdWords. Be warned, it is very easy to go through a substantial amount of money for no reward using these services if you are not careful. AdWords (amongst others) lets you pick a maximum budget a day, but, although $5 may not sound like much, $5/day is $150+ per month. Better make sure your keywords are correctly identified, and, in preference, not highly competed on, and that your sales copy is good enough before doing this.

Quality Traffic, not Just Traffic
It's what everyone is after, more traffic to their website. Traffic is easy to obtain, though. Autosurfers, manual hit exchanges and purchased traffic will all send visitors to your website. However, this traffic is just visitors, many of whom will just burn up your bandwidth for no reward. Unless you are receiving decent money for pay per impression advertising, such as banners and popups, this traffic can be totally valueless.

Repeat Traffic
Unless you only require visitors to visit your site once, because you are selling a one-off product, and your sales copy is fantastic enough that they are hooked to buy on the first visit (and if you are regulary doing this, write an ebook explaining how and sell it), you will want visitors to return. If there is nothing of value at your site, visitors may come once, but they won't come back of their own accord. Typically, it is estimated that a prospective customer will be exposed seven times to a product etc. before buying.

Reciprocal Linking
Whilst somewhat frowned upon, and generally thought to not be as valuable as one-way linking (see below) for search engine optimization, a relevant reciprocal linking campaign can be an important traffic generating tool. swap links with sites in a related, but non-competing, business to your own. It isn't really a good idea to link to competitors; although visitors will be interested in your product, there is a good chance you will lose them to your competitor, especially if their website or product is better or looks better than your own. Not a desirable outcome. For example, a web hosting site could link to a site that sells scripts and programs; visitors to one will more than likely use the other, but the sites are not in direct competition. You can also swap links with web directories that require a reciprocal link.

One-Way Linking
Considered the best form of link for SEO purposes, this can also be a good source of traffic. There are a number of ways of getting one-way links. The easiest is submission to free web directories (see above). Another good source is by writing articles relevant to your site or industry, putting a resource box at the bottom, then posting the article on the directories such as GoArticles, or by sumbitting to the ezines. Webmasters and ezine publishers are always in need of fresh content, and will publish your article for free. The hardest way of getting one-way inbound links is by having websites voluntarily link to you. The only way to do this is by providing a valuable tool, service or resource that other webmasters will want to direct their visitors to

Adrian Kennelly is the webmaster of DirectoryGold Web Directory and Portal at http://www.directorygold.com

Of Spam and Sandboxes

About a month ago I had the privilege of giving a demo of the next version of Sonic Page Blaster to the attendees at Yanik Silvers Underground Online Marketing Seminar. I fielded a couple questions afterwards that bear a better treatment than I could manage on the spur of the moment and in less than 60 seconds.

Q: If we create feeder sites that point to our main sales page or money site, wont they be adversely affected by Googles sandbox?

A: Lets first define what we mean by the Google sandbox. Over the last seven months or so it has become apparent that new web sites do not tend to show as high a page rank as older established sites. The reason for this is not a raw prejudice against new sites. According to my sources, it is instead an attempt by the search engine giant to discount the effect of reciprocal linking, especially paid linking. If links cost you money and they have no immediate effect, chances are most people will abandon the practice.

And thats exactly what Google is hoping for. Frankly, I understand and support this move. The reason is that Googles motives and mine coincide. Google is trying to make sure they return the most relevant and highest quality results available for a given search term. If I have the most relevant and authoritative web site for a given subject that encompasses those same search terms, I want Google to return my results at the top of the heap. I dont want spammy link farms to change this.

The key is quality. Really, over time, the best search engine marketing strategy is to create a killer web site. Wouldnt it be nice if all the energy we direct towards search engine optimization could instead be focused on the quality of our web site? Google feels the same way, believe me, and the refinements they make to their alogorithms are designed to move in that direction. For that reason alone, the quality and focus of your web site is your best long-term SEO play.

Q. Could automatically generated web pages be penalized as "spam" by search engine spiders?

A. I call Sonic Page Blaster SPB a lot, and I definitely dont think of the S as standing for spam. On the contrary, Sonic Page Blaster simply saves you time in creating search engine-friendly web pages that contain really good articles that pertain exactly to the content of your web site. No automatic content system can find the content that best fits your niche. You need to either write or find the articles that will help your web site visitors or subscribers the most. I know that a few of the seminar attendees I talked to had spam-filled stars in their eyes when they saw SPB churn out a bunch of pages at the push of a button.

Trust me, you dont want to go there. Google will eventually punish you in a big way.

Here are some rules that I believe will not only help your search rankings, but also drive the right kind of traffic to your primary web site (at the seminar Jeff Johnson called these money pages).

1. Do not post duplicate content at multiple web sites, especially if you own them all, if they are on the same server, and if they link to each other. SPB makes it so easy to generate article mini-sites, why would you want to duplicate content, anyway? With SPB you have a huge advantage over those who have to manually create web pages. Use your advantage. Create many web sites that focus on narrow subject matters, each having their own set of articles.

Worried about duplicate content and potential search engine punishment? Good. You should be. Dont do it.

Ah, but what about duplicate content on other peoples web sites? If they dont link to you, you dont have anything to worry about. Ill save a further explanation about that for later, but I dont believe it makes sense for Google to punish you for something that is not giving you any advantage. Besides, they understand content syndication. Googles developers and designers are anything but stupid.

2. Your money site does not necessarily need to be extremely narrowly focused on a few key words, but your feeder sites should be. For example, I will soon be starting a web site for those folks trying to develop an online business in their spare time. That is, they hold down a regular job and do this stuff at night. The site is called MidnightMarketer.com and it is not live yet (but the sign-up page works). Anyway, that will be one of my money sites. It will cover a plethora of topics related to internet marketing, time management, technology, and even health.

In order to feed it potential customers, I am also developing feeder sites that will focus on each of those more focused topics. The feeder sites will contain as many highly focused articles on their subject matter as I can find. My goal is that the search engines will (rightly) see them as quite valuable and relevant results for some important search terms. Then visitors will see the links and ads for MidnightMarketer and head on over. I can even make a little money off those that dont click through to MidnightMarketer.com, thanks to Adsense ads mixed into each page by Sonic Page Blaster.

3. Dont use reciprocal links, especially between your feeder sites and your money page. Yes, I know that flies in the face of conventional wisdom. But try to understand Googles motivations--that is the key to predicting what they will eventually do. They understand that one-way links are usually more meaningful than reciprocal links, which are often just trades between webmasters. A one-way link usually points to something useful.

OK, Ill back off on this just a little: When you can, get one-way links. When there is no other choice, reciprocate. And yes, you can be sure Google keeps track of all links into and out of a web site.

4. Do use a blog, hopefully even more than one. Blogs dont have to be on your server(s), theyre not owned by you, and it is going to drive Googles software gurus nuts trying to sort the wheat from the chaff in the blogging world. Even though I support Google in most things, it is kinda fun to do something that makes them a little crazy. [I mean that in a good way, Sergei.]

== Rossaroni, no baloney ==

The MidnightMarketer
Ross Lambert is a senior software engineer for a fast-growing telecommunications firm in Kirkland, WA. He is also the founder of MidnightMarketer.com and TheVentureForge.com

Promote Your Products Without Annoying Spam Filters

How many times have you realized that your email simply doesn't arrive to your list or you suspect something is going wrong because you don't get the response you are waiting for?, this is more common today than yesterday and will be critical tomorrow.




It's frustrating for us that our Content is not deliver to the end-user, this is true for you and all the people dependable on email technology, the results plainly don't come, whatever they can be.


Have you seen those funny email arriving to your email container with odd characters that some times seem like the sender is telling you rude words? Don't take it literally, is an effort from the advertisers to deliver their best proposition trying to bypass the filters... some of them will arrive, some of them are taken out from you and put inside the waste container of your ISP.

Is there some hope for the small entrepreneur in this jungle of spam filters, viruses, and junk information?


Deliver Quality Content To End-user And Promote Your Products Without Annoying Spam Filters: RSS Gives you the Chance To Deliver messages To End-user

It's A Fact: At present this is the best way to beat spam filters, RSS is the fresh road to walk, getting rid of the problems that nowadays attack the email option, this allows you to send your messages to the users with 100% sureness they will arrive, we don't know if RSS is the email killer, its too early to state and coin this phrase, anyway some gurus say its here to bury email, some others think is only an alternative way to keep in contact with the end-user ... the only true is: You can deliver your messages spam free.


But its not costless, you need to work, and work constantly and with quality, if any of these variables fail, all your efforts go to the drainage piping. Why? If the end-user are no more interested in your content he/she can kiss you good bye easily with a finger, the small one on the delete key.


RSS is The Secret Weapon To Deliver Quality Content

RSS gives the power to the end-user, this means marketers must be concerned with the content they deliver, for most of the sellers this is a hard alternative, but at the end the online world will see a lot of websites full of worthy content, the users will come again and again, and if this happen to you, your days will be longer and profitable.


Deliver quality content is the advertisers and webmasters payment, this is not negative, Search Engines go in the same direction, if you want a good SE position it most be due to your content, content tends to be the only parameter in the near future. Make your homework and you'll see positive results in short time. If this not convince you, remember, email is living the hard way and if things go in the same direction it will go out of sight, at least like a marketing alternative.


What all this means for the end-user?


The end user just now is the winner, he/she has the control, are able to access any kind of information in accordance to his/her interest: news, marketing options, leisure sites, knowledge pages, new content is notified automatically, can subscribe/unsubscribe with total freedom, no more need to travel to the websites and waste time looking for something new....

C Zarza
20+ experience in the information technology world,
He has built financial system for several years
Background: Databases, Web , Finances ...
czarzac@gmail.com
http://www.nesswords.com
 

Promote Your Products Without Annoying Spam Filters

 How many times have you realized that your email simply doesn't arrive to your list or you suspect something is going wrong because you don't get the response you are waiting for?, this is more common today than yesterday and will be critical tomorrow.




It's frustrating for us that our Content is not deliver to the end-user, this is true for you and all the people dependable on email technology, the results plainly don't come, whatever they can be.


Have you seen those funny email arriving to your email container with odd characters that some times seem like the sender is telling you rude words? Don't take it literally, is an effort from the advertisers to deliver their best proposition trying to bypass the filters... some of them will arrive, some of them are taken out from you and put inside the waste container of your ISP.

Is there some hope for the small entrepreneur in this jungle of spam filters, viruses, and junk information?


Deliver Quality Content To End-user And Promote Your Products Without Annoying Spam Filters: RSS Gives you the Chance To Deliver messages To End-user

It's A Fact: At present this is the best way to beat spam filters, RSS is the fresh road to walk, getting rid of the problems that nowadays attack the email option, this allows you to send your messages to the users with 100% sureness they will arrive, we don't know if RSS is the email killer, its too early to state and coin this phrase, anyway some gurus say its here to bury email, some others think is only an alternative way to keep in contact with the end-user ... the only true is: You can deliver your messages spam free.


But its not costless, you need to work, and work constantly and with quality, if any of these variables fail, all your efforts go to the drainage piping. Why? If the end-user are no more interested in your content he/she can kiss you good bye easily with a finger, the small one on the delete key.


RSS is The Secret Weapon To Deliver Quality Content

RSS gives the power to the end-user, this means marketers must be concerned with the content they deliver, for most of the sellers this is a hard alternative, but at the end the online world will see a lot of websites full of worthy content, the users will come again and again, and if this happen to you, your days will be longer and profitable.


Deliver quality content is the advertisers and webmasters payment, this is not negative, Search Engines go in the same direction, if you want a good SE position it most be due to your content, content tends to be the only parameter in the near future. Make your homework and you'll see positive results in short time. If this not convince you, remember, email is living the hard way and if things go in the same direction it will go out of sight, at least like a marketing alternative.


What all this means for the end-user?


The end user just now is the winner, he/she has the control, are able to access any kind of information in accordance to his/her interest: news, marketing options, leisure sites, knowledge pages, new content is notified automatically, can subscribe/unsubscribe with total freedom, no more need to travel to the websites and waste time looking for something new....

C Zarza
20+ experience in the information technology world,
He has built financial system for several years
Background: Databases, Web , Finances ...
czarzac@gmail.com
http://www.nesswords.com
 

Finding an Acceptable Solution to Conquer Spam Email

When e-mailing first became popular during the early 1990s, it was seen by many as a quick, convenient and easy way to send a message or image to friends and acquaintances. After all, this is what it was intended to do. On the up side, it eliminated trips to the post office and stationery store. Unfortunately, there was also a down side -it was easily exploited by some as a cheap, simple way to send unsolicited advertisements to lots and lots of people.

Since 1994, the sending of unwanted, unsolicited e-mail, otherwise known as spam (a term borrowed from an old Monty Python satire) has escalated exponentially. Some professional spammers send as many as ten million messages daily. But even if only one in 10,000 people respond, spam can obviously be profitable - otherwise, no one would bother to send it.

For those such as authors, who legitimately want to put their
articles into the hands of publishers, there are services such
as the phantom writers (http://www.thephantomwriters.com), who
send to their lists of thousands of sources. However, this is
all opt-in and perfectly appropriate. And in most cases, services
such as this actually deliver their email to double opt-in lists.

One British spam tracking service, Spamhaus, estimates that more
than 80% of all e-mails sent in the U.S. are spam, and in Europe,
the number exceeds 50%. This is expensive, costing billions of
dollars in lost business and taking up computing capacity that
spammers use for free. In addition, computer security is
compromised.

This has long been recognized as a critical problem, and a
variety of solutions have been proposed. It has been suggested
that perhaps there should be a small charge for sending and/or
receiving e-mail to cut down on traffic The problem with that
suggestion is that the spammers won't end up paying, but instead
will post using a fraudulent account.

The U.S. Government even came up with its own bright solution
to create a "do not spam" list, modeled on the "do not call"
registry that has been so successful. The problem there is that
this isn't going to stop spammers, many of whom are located
outside the U.S. It will simply confirm live e-mail addresses,
providing more incentive to send the stuff. This suggestion
was quickly scrapped.

Currently, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and AOL are working to find
an acceptable solution. It's going to be a very difficult task
and may take a lot of compromise among these companies. However,
from this vantage point, it looks as though whatever is proposed,
the spammers are going to be one step ahead.
Rosalyn Bronstein, for more than 20 years an author and
consultant, has been an advisor to numerous multinational
corporations and international organizations. Understanding
the value of maintaining relationships, http://www.ntouchnrat.com
was created. It's a unique and secure way to never lose touch
again with the people who have brought meaning to you life,
without having to use e-mail.
 

BUSTED: Anti Spam Forces Bankrupt Super-Spammer Scott Richter

Trust, Inc.Microsoft scores one for the good guys
Scott Richter, the self-proclaimed Spam King, just cant seem to get enough attention. Admittedly responsible for sending literally billions of Unsolicited Commercial Email messages (UCE), Richter made headlines again recently when his spam-fed cash cow, OptInRealBig.com, filed for bankruptcy protection in U.S. federal court in his home state of Colorado. According to Richters father (who is also his attorney), Its the legal fees that are battering the company. OptIn is profitable but for these lawsuits.

At the time of its bankruptcy filing, OptInRealBig.com claimed assets of less than $10 million and liabilities of over $50 million. Richter claimed his company made $15 million a year sending more than 15 million email messages per day. However, in 2003, OptInRealBig was dealt a powerful 1-2 punch from Microsoft and Eliot Spitzer, the Attorney General of New York; both sued Richter under local state anti spam laws. Although the New York case was settled out of court last year, Richter has had no such luck dealing with Microsoft, whose claims top $19 million.

A Case of Global Amnesia?
Richter's company and others like it market products ranging from diet pills to pornography. Hes also been accused of using spam to extract personal information from unsuspecting recipients. For instance, one alleged scheme hatched by Richter and his associates promised recipients a copy of a "Girls Gone Wild" DVD if the recipient registered on a website. The registration information was then used to bombard the recipient with more and more spam.

Richter contends that his methods are all legal, and that hes just a regular guy trying to do right by the world; hes even gone so far as to claim that hes a victim of overzealous anti spam companies and prosecutors. We don't spam, explained Richter in an August 2004 PC World interview. The biggest problem is when people get an email that they think they didn't sign up for or don't remember signing up for, and they call it spam.

To hear Richter tell it, tens of millions of people simply forgot that they had previously asked to receive his messages. According to the state of New York, however, he falsified header information and used deceptive routing and domain purchase practices in order to get his messages through. The lawsuit also accused Richter of using a network of approximately 500 zombie computers to send his messages. When asked how so many users could have subscribed and not remember doing so, Richter claimed the signups must have been via anonymous "partners of our partners" web sites, the names of which slipped his mind.

Not Just an Online Threat
Evidently not satisfied with stealing bandwidth, Richter also shows a penchant for heavy equipment. In an unrelated 2003 case, he was put on probation after pleading guilty to a felony charge of receiving stolen items worth more than $10,000. According to court records, an informant's tip regarding a stolen Bobcat loader led undercover officers to Richter. Over the course of 13 months, the officers proceeded to strike deals with him for a Honda generator, hundreds of cases of cigarettes, three laptop computers and other items, all offered at suspiciously low prices and purchased in some of Denvers seediest neighborhoods. In addition to probation, Richter was also ordered to pay $38,000 in restitution for the stolen goods.

Despite his guilty plea, Richter maintains his innocence, saying he pleaded guilty to the felony charges because it was "easier to be done with it," and he had "too much stuff going on in my life."

Whats Next for Scott Richter?
The 5-year-old OptInRealBig.com, which employed 25 people last year and had 350 clients, will continue to operate under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. While the bankruptcy filing shows the power of legislation and legal action from parties with a vested interest in stopping spam, Richter is not likely to fade quietly into the sunset. Under Chapter 11 bankruptcy laws, the company must follow a court-supervised debt rehabilitation plan to pay off creditors, but is not required to modify its business practices. None of OptInRealBigs assets will be liquidated, meaning the companys stable of spam cannons will remain active. The bottom line: Scott Richter will not be required to stop sending UCE in the immediate future, pending ongoing litigation intended to determine exactly what spam is in legal terms. In the meantime, the best defense against spam is a comprehensive gateway solution that will guard against all manner of email threats, especially spammers like Scott Richter.
Dr. Paul Judge is a noted scholar and entrepreneur. He is Chief Technology Officer at CipherTrust, the industry's largest provider of enterprise email security. The companys flagship product, IronMail provides a best of breed enterprise anti spam solution designed to stop spam, phishing attacks and other email-based threats. Learn more by visiting www.ciphertrust.com/products/spam_and_fraud_protection today.

 

Evict the Spammers from Your Inbox

Trust, Inc.Block Spam and Other Email Threats From Entering Your Gateway
Spam, commonly defined as unsolicited commercial email, is a powerful advertising channel for many products and services. As a result, spamming has become a profitable business, driven by the low cost of sending email compared to other direct marketing techniques. The high return on investment for spammers has resulted in an overwhelming volume of unwanted messages in personal and business email boxes. Consider this: Conducting a direct mail campaign costs an average of $1.39 per person, meaning that a response rate of 1 in 14 is necessary just to break even on a product with a $20 gross profit. Selling the same item via unsolicited spam email costs only $0.0004 per person, meaning that a response rate of 1 in 50,000 gets the seller back to break-even; anything above that is gravy. With profit margins like these, its easy to see why spammers will try anything to get past anti spam technology to deliver their messages to your inbox.

Types of Spam Threats
The recent onset of fraudulent spam variants such as phishing and spoofing pose an even greater risk than the spam volume clogging email servers. Spammers use techniques such as phishing and spoofing to fool users into opening messages that, at first glance, appear innocuous.

Phishing
Phishing is a specific type of spam message that solicits personal information from the recipient. Phishers use social engineering techniques to fool end users into believing that the message originated from a trusted sender, making these attacks especially dangerous because they often con victims into divulging social security numbers, bank account information or credit card numbers. In one six-month period from November 2003 to May 2004, phishing attacks increased in frequency by 4000%, and the trend continues upward.

An example of phishing is an email that appears to come from a bank requesting that users log into their account to update or correct personal information. When the users follow a link embedded in the email, they are redirected to a site that looks and behaves like the expected bank website. However, unbeknownst to the soon-to-be identity theft victims, the site is actually controlled by the scam artists who sent the email; any and all information entered by the victim can now be used in a variety of ways, none of them good.

Spoofing
Spoofing is a deceptive form of spam that hides the domain of the spammer or the spams origination point. Spammers often hijack the domains of well-known businesses or government entities to make spam filters think the communication is coming from a legitimate source.

Todays spammers are more crafty than ever before and have begun blending elements of both phishing and spoofing into their messages, further spinning their web of deception. The toxic combination of spoofing and phishing presents a major threat that can trick most anyone into providing personal information to a stranger.

Toothless Legislation
On January 1, 2004, President Bush signed into law the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003, or CAN-SPAM Act. While well intentioned, CAN-SPAM has done little or nothing to curb the flow of unwanted email. In fact, an estimated 97% of all spam email sent in 2004 violated the Act, and the United States still dwarfs other nations in terms of the origin of spam, with CipherTrust research revealing that an astonishing 56.77% of all spam comes from U.S.-based IP addresses. While CAN-SPAM was designed to decrease the overall volume of spam, the exact opposite has happened: in 2004, spam accounted for approximately 77% of all email traffic, and phishing attacks continue to increase exponentially, with studies showing an increase of 4000% from November 2003 to May 2004.

Anti Spam Software for the Desktop
The dramatic increase in spam volume has prompted a corresponding surge in stand-alone anti spam software solutions for the desktop, all with varying levels of effectiveness. Some anti spam software uses text filtering to screen incoming messages for known characteristics of spam, while other solutions rely solely on reputation systems that monitor and categorize email senders by IP address according to their sending behavior. Still other anti spam software uses challenge/response filters to block unapproved mail until the sender responds (manually) to a challenge email sent to their email account to verify his or her identity.

With so many different methods of filtering spam, no single software-based desktop anti spam solution is capable of effectively stopping spam before it reaches the inbox. The only way to successfully fight spam is to create an anti spam cocktail including reputation services, text filters, constant updates and a host of other best-of-breed spam blocking methods. Just as importantly, an effective anti spam solution should reside at the email gateway, not at the desktop. Without protection at the gateway, mail servers waste massive amounts of bandwidth and storage space processing every message, wanted or not, and end users face the unenviable task of deciding what to do with the countless spam messages that successfully reach them.

Take a Consolidated Approach to Anti Spam
Although it takes a person only a moment to process a message and identify it as spam, it is difficult to automate that human process because no single message characteristic consistently identifies spam. In fact, there are hundreds of different message characteristics that may indicate an email is spam, and an effective anti spam solution must be capable of employing multiple spam detection techniques.

In addition to effectively identifying spam, businesses must be assured that legitimate mail is not blocked in error. Even one false positive, or incorrectly blocked email, can have a significant impact on businesses today. Accurate spam blocking requires a combination of tools to examine various message criteria combined with real-time research and intelligence data.
By aggregating multiple spam detection technologies like text filtering, reputation services, traffic analysis and other best-of-breed techniques, and placing the solution
Dr. Paul Judge is a noted scholar and entrepreneur. He is Chief Technology Officer at CipherTrust, the industry's largest provider of enterprise email security. The companys flagship product, IronMail provides a best of breed enterprise anti spam solution designed to stop spam, phishing attacks and other email-based threats. Learn more by visiting www.ciphertrust.com/products/spam_and_fraud_protection today.
 

Hall of Shame The Bad Boys of Email Spam

Trust, Inc.The majority of Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) or spam is sent by a relatively small group of dedicated professional spammers. The Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) indicates that 80% of all spam comes from just 200 known spam operations. This data is in line with research completed by CipherTrust research scientists, which indicates that most spam originates from a relatively small group of tightly integrated spam networks. While were all very familiar with the spam messages we receive each day, it is interesting to take a look at who these spammers are to put a face to the problem. Following are four of the most notorious and prolific spammers in the world.

Alan Ralsky
Mr. Ralsky is currently one of the most egregious spam senders in the world. His organization, based in Michigan since 1997, uses Chinese, European and US-based servers to host and send spam to millions of email boxes daily. But thats not enough for Ralsky. Not only does he operate as a spammer, but he also provides hosting services to other spammers.

In 2002, Verizon sued Mr. Ralsky for causing their network to freeze twice. The lawsuit originally sought $37 million, but was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. Ralsky is no longer allowed to send email over Verizons networks, but admits no wrongdoing in the case and has vowed to continue sending bulk email.

Mr. Ralsky was convicted in 1994 for falsifying documents to defraud two banks in Michigan and Ohio and was fined $74,000. In an unrelated case in 1992, Ralsky was sentenced to 50 days in jail and ordered to pay $120,000 in restitution for failing to deliver a contract involving unregistered securities.

While Mr. Ralsky sends millions of unsolicited email messages selling everything from diet pills to online gambling, he claims that his business is legitimate and that his emails are not spam. He also insists that he does not sell pornography. Were sure hes an absolutely charming fellow.

Scott Richter
Scott Richters Denver-based company, OptinRealBig, is responsible for sending out billions of spam emails. He is one of the most outspoken and notorious spammers in business today. Whereas most spammers attempt to keep a low profile, often denying any involvement in spam, Richter seems to enjoy the spotlight. In fact, Richter even attempted to start up a Spam King clothing line before Hormel (the company responsible for bringing delicious canned Spam to dining rooms around the world) put an end to his trademark-infringing idea.

Richter and his partners were named in a lawsuit filed by the New York Attorney General and Microsoft. That suit, filed in 2003, sought millions of dollars in punitive damages, but was settled out of court in mid-2004 with a paltry fine of $50,000. For quite some time, Richter regarded his legal entanglements as excellent advertising for his company which, he claimed, gains value each time he is sued.

Recently he has changed his story somewhat. Faced with prolonged lawsuits led by Microsoft as well as various state and corporate entities, Richter has now declared bankruptcy. As his father (who is also his attorney) said, "Its the legal fees that are battering the company. OptIn is profitable but for these lawsuits."

Andrew Westmoreland
An apparent accomplice of Scott Richter, Westmorelands Texas-based company, Internet Access Group Inc., sends millions of spam messages pushing everything from gas to online diploma mills to auto loans and mortgages. His business also operates under the names Brilliant Marketing, Aphrodite Marketing, OptiGate Networks and Players Exchange Club.

Robert Soloway
Robert Soloways Oregon-based company, Newport Internet Marketing Corporation, has sent millions of spam emails and has been the subject of numerous complaints and lawsuits by class action groups and Microsoft.

Soloways spam messages often contain get-rich-quick schemes selling (what else?) spam software and fresh email addresses. Yes, thats right folks; you too can send spam to 15 million recipients for just $295. At least thats what the ad says, but would you want to give your credit card number to someone like this?

Slam the Door on Spam
This is just a small sampling of the questionable characters who insist on clogging your inbox with junk email. While these may be some of the most egregious offenders, there are plenty more waiting in the wings who would like nothing more than to be considered equally offensive. As these new spammers rise through the ranks, well keep you posted on who they are, and what kind of shady business theyre up to.
Dr. Paul Judge is a noted scholar and entrepreneur. He is Chief Technology Officer at CipherTrust, the industry's largest provider of enterprise email security. The companys flagship product, IronMail provides a best of breed enterprise anti spam solution designed to stop spam, phishing attacks and other email-based threats. Learn more by visiting www.ciphertrust.com/products/spam_and_fraud_protection today.
 

How Spammers Fool Bayesian Filters - And How to Stop Them

 Trust, Inc.Effectively stopping spam over the long-term requires much more than blocking individual IP addresses and creating rules based on keywords that spammers typically use. The increasing sophistication of spam tools coupled with the increasing number of spammers in the wild has created a hyper-evolution in the variety and volume of spam. The old ways of blocking the bad guys just dont work anymore.

Examining spam and spam-blocking technology can illuminate how this evolution is taking place and what can be done to combat spam and reclaim e-mail as the efficient, effective communication tool it was intended to be.

One method used to combat spam is Bayesian Filtering. Named after Thomas Bayes, an English mathematician, Bayesian Logic is used in decision making and inferential statistics. Bayesian Filers maintain a database of known spam and ham, or legitimate email. Once the database is large enough, the system ranks the words according to the probability they will appear in a spam message.

Words more likely to appear in spam are given a high score (between 51 and 100), and words likely to appear in legitimate email are given a low score (between 1 and 50). For example, the words free and sex generally have values between 95 and 98, whereas the words emphasis or disadvantage may have a score between 1 and 4. Commonly used words such as the and that, and words new to the Bayesian filters are given a neutral score between 40 and 50 and would not be used in the systems algorithm.

When the system receives an email, it breaks the message down into tokens, or words with values assigned to them. The system utilizes the tokens with scores on the high and low end of the range and develops a score for the email as a whole. If the email has more spam tokens than ham tokens, the email will have a high spam score. The email administrator determines a threshold score the system uses to allow email to pass through to users.

Bayesian filters are effective at filtering spam and minimizing false positives. Because they adapt and learn based on user feedback, Bayesian Filers produce better results as they are used within an organization over time. They are not, however, foolproof. Spammers have learned which words Bayesian Filters consider spammy and have developed ways to insert non-spammy words into emails to lower the messages overall spam score. By adding in paragraphs of text from novels or news stories, spammers can dilute the effects of high-ranking words. Text insertion has also caused normally legitimate words that are found in novels or news stories to have an inflated spam score. This may potentially render Bayesian filters less effective over time.

Another approach spammers use to fool Bayesian filters is to create less spammy emails. For example, a spammer may send an email containing only the phrase, Heres the link. This approach can neutralize the spam score and entice users to click on a link to a Web site containing the spammers message. To block this type of spam, the filter would have to be designed to follow the link and scan the content of the Web site users are asked to visit. This type of filtering is not currently employed by Bayesian filters because it would be prohibitively expensive in terms of server resources and could potentially be used as a method of launching denial of service attacks against commercial servers.

As with all single-method spam filtering methodologies, Bayesian filters are effective against certain techniques spammers use to fool spam filters, but are not a magic bullet to solving the spam problem. Bayesian filters are most effective when combined with other methods of spam detection.

The Solution
When used individually, each anti-spam technique has been systematically overcome by spammers. Grandiose plans to rid the world of spam, such as charging a penny for each e-mail received or forcing servers to solve mathematical problems before delivering e-mail, have been proposed with few results. These schemes are not realistic and would require a large percentage of the population to adopt the same anti-spam method in order to be effective. You can learn more about the fight against spam by visiting our website at www.ciphertrust.com and downloading our whitepapers.

Dr. Paul Judge is a noted scholar and entrepreneur. He is Chief Technology Officer at CipherTrust, the industry's largest provider of enterprise email security. The companys flagship product, IronMail provides a best of breed enterprise anti spam solution designed to stop spam, phishing attacks and other email-based threats. Learn more by visiting www.ciphertrust.com/products/spam_and_fraud_protection today.
 

Spammer in the Slammer: Jeremy Jaynes Sentenced to Nine Years

 Trust, Inc.Will other spammers take heed? Dont count on it.Jeremy Jaynes was on top of the world. By age 28, he owned a million-dollar home, a high-class restaurant, a chain of gyms and countless other toys. Yet those were only the spoils of his main line of business, which was swindling innocent people out of their money through email scams. From an unassuming house serving as his companys headquarters in Raleigh, NC, Jaynes sent an estimated ten million messages a day pitching products most recipients didn't want, amassing an estimated $24 million fortune in the process. Using aliases such as Jeremy James and Gaven Stubberfield, Jaynes spammed his way up to the 8 position on Spamhaus Register Of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) and grossed as much as $750,000 a month, allowing him to live like a king.However, Jaynes ran head-on into an information superhighway road block when a Virginia judge sentenced him to nine years in prison for his November 2004 conviction on felony charges of using false IP addresses to send mass email advertisements (some just call it spamming). The conviction was a landmark decision, as Jaynes became the first person in the United States convicted of felony spam charges. Though his operation was based in North Carolina, Jaynes was tried in Virginia because it is home to a large number of the routers that control much of North America's Internet traffic (its also the home of AOL and a government building or two). He shouldve Used the Privacy SoftwareDuring the trial, prosecutors focused on three of Jaynes most egregious scams: software that promised to protect users' private information; a service for choosing penny stocks to invest in; and a work-from-home "FedEx refund processor" opportunity that promised $75-an-hour work but did little more than give buyers access to a website of delinquent FedEx accounts. Sound familiar? Anyone with an e-mail address has received countless messages originating from Jaynes operation. (If youre still waiting on your privacy software to show up, its probably safe to stop checking the mailbox.)Jaynes got lists of millions of email addresses through a stolen database of America Online customers. He also illegally obtained e-mail addresses of eBay users. While the prosecutors still don't know how Jaynes got access to the lists, the Associated Press reported that the AOL names matched a list of 92 million addresses that an AOL software engineer has been charged with stealing.When Jaynes operation was raided, investigators found that the house from which he ran his operation was wired with 16 T-1 lines (a large office building can get by on a single T-1 line for all its users). Investigators also entered into evidence to-do lists handwritten by Jaynes. Take a look at Jeremy Jayne's meticulously detailed lists at:* www.ciphertrust.com/images/jaynes_notes1.JPG* www.ciphertrust.com/images/jaynes_notes2.JPG* www.ciphertrust.com/images/jaynes_notes3.JPGGood Work if You Can Get (Away With) ItThe economics of spamming makes Jaynes decision to build a career of it understandable, though not noble. Spammers work on the law of averages, which would seem like an odd strategy considering that the average response rate for a spam message is just one-tenth of one percent. However, once you do the math even this miniscule response rate can make one very wealthy very quickly. If a spammer sends one million messages pushing a product width a $40 profit, a response rate of 0.1 percent works out to 1000 customers, or $40,000 per million messages sent. Since each message costs only fractions of a penny to send, and Jaynes was sending literally billions of messages a year, its easy to see how he pulled in $400,000 to $750,000 a month, while spending perhaps $50,000 on bandwidth and other overhead. Spammers have financial motivation to come up with innovative ways to avoid detection, and they have begun to join forces. But as spammers become savvier, the public is fighting back. Law enforcement has begun to crack down on internet criminals, like Jaynes, and corporations are taking measures to defend their inboxes using anti spam hardware. Law enforcement, coupled with the effectiveness of today's anti-spam systems, is introducing hesitation, uncertainty and fear for many would be spammers. As profitability decreases and risk of prosecution increases, many spammers will be forced to simply pack up and move on.
Dr. Paul Judge is a noted scholar and entrepreneur. He is Chief Technology Officer at CipherTrust, the industry's largest provider of enterprise email security. The companys flagship product, IronMail provides a best of breed enterprise anti spam solution designed to stop spam, phishing attacks and other email-based threats. Learn more by visiting www.ciphertrust.com/products/spam_and_fraud_protection today.
 

Spammer in the Slammer: Jeremy Jaynes Sentenced to Nine Years

 Trust, Inc.Will other spammers take heed? Dont count on it.Jeremy Jaynes was on top of the world. By age 28, he owned a million-dollar home, a high-class restaurant, a chain of gyms and countless other toys. Yet those were only the spoils of his main line of business, which was swindling innocent people out of their money through email scams. From an unassuming house serving as his companys headquarters in Raleigh, NC, Jaynes sent an estimated ten million messages a day pitching products most recipients didn't want, amassing an estimated $24 million fortune in the process. Using aliases such as Jeremy James and Gaven Stubberfield, Jaynes spammed his way up to the 8 position on Spamhaus Register Of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) and grossed as much as $750,000 a month, allowing him to live like a king.However, Jaynes ran head-on into an information superhighway road block when a Virginia judge sentenced him to nine years in prison for his November 2004 conviction on felony charges of using false IP addresses to send mass email advertisements (some just call it spamming). The conviction was a landmark decision, as Jaynes became the first person in the United States convicted of felony spam charges. Though his operation was based in North Carolina, Jaynes was tried in Virginia because it is home to a large number of the routers that control much of North America's Internet traffic (its also the home of AOL and a government building or two). He shouldve Used the Privacy SoftwareDuring the trial, prosecutors focused on three of Jaynes most egregious scams: software that promised to protect users' private information; a service for choosing penny stocks to invest in; and a work-from-home "FedEx refund processor" opportunity that promised $75-an-hour work but did little more than give buyers access to a website of delinquent FedEx accounts. Sound familiar? Anyone with an e-mail address has received countless messages originating from Jaynes operation. (If youre still waiting on your privacy software to show up, its probably safe to stop checking the mailbox.)Jaynes got lists of millions of email addresses through a stolen database of America Online customers. He also illegally obtained e-mail addresses of eBay users. While the prosecutors still don't know how Jaynes got access to the lists, the Associated Press reported that the AOL names matched a list of 92 million addresses that an AOL software engineer has been charged with stealing.When Jaynes operation was raided, investigators found that the house from which he ran his operation was wired with 16 T-1 lines (a large office building can get by on a single T-1 line for all its users). Investigators also entered into evidence to-do lists handwritten by Jaynes. Take a look at Jeremy Jayne's meticulously detailed lists at:* www.ciphertrust.com/images/jaynes_notes1.JPG* www.ciphertrust.com/images/jaynes_notes2.JPG* www.ciphertrust.com/images/jaynes_notes3.JPGGood Work if You Can Get (Away With) ItThe economics of spamming makes Jaynes decision to build a career of it understandable, though not noble. Spammers work on the law of averages, which would seem like an odd strategy considering that the average response rate for a spam message is just one-tenth of one percent. However, once you do the math even this miniscule response rate can make one very wealthy very quickly. If a spammer sends one million messages pushing a product width a $40 profit, a response rate of 0.1 percent works out to 1000 customers, or $40,000 per million messages sent. Since each message costs only fractions of a penny to send, and Jaynes was sending literally billions of messages a year, its easy to see how he pulled in $400,000 to $750,000 a month, while spending perhaps $50,000 on bandwidth and other overhead. Spammers have financial motivation to come up with innovative ways to avoid detection, and they have begun to join forces. But as spammers become savvier, the public is fighting back. Law enforcement has begun to crack down on internet criminals, like Jaynes, and corporations are taking measures to defend their inboxes using anti spam hardware. Law enforcement, coupled with the effectiveness of today's anti-spam systems, is introducing hesitation, uncertainty and fear for many would be spammers. As profitability decreases and risk of prosecution increases, many spammers will be forced to simply pack up and move on.
Dr. Paul Judge is a noted scholar and entrepreneur. He is Chief Technology Officer at CipherTrust, the industry's largest provider of enterprise email security. The companys flagship product, IronMail provides a best of breed enterprise anti spam solution designed to stop spam, phishing attacks and other email-based threats. Learn more by visiting www.ciphertrust.com/products/spam_and_fraud_protection today.