Internet Business Blog

Email spam is quite a popular topic at the moment. Not only are there a few mentions in my feed reader, but just this week I decided to route all of email for my main client hosting server through a dedicated email filtering appliance which is basically a dedicated mail server kitted out with a Bayesian filter. It’s quite an advanced piece kit which is not only very accurate when it comes to identifying true spam, but also has a nice user interface to allow easy access to the quarantine and white/black lists.

As well as more accurate email filtering, it means that the web server doesn’t have to process the thousands of emails it would otherwise have to every day and can get on with serving websites. So for my web hosting clients, it’s a big plus. For me, it’s a little extra cost, but the web server is more stable and there are more resources available.

Personal Spam

Moving on to spam that I receive personally, well, I don’t really get any or at least hardly any ever gets through to me and I personally use dozens of different email addresses. I can’t even remember the last time I saw an email flagged as spam in my copy of Mailwasher Pro – a truly excellent piece of software which I use to monitor all of my active email addresses.

How’s this possible? I used to get spam, like most people do, but then I spent a lot of time researching the subject and coming up with practical ways in which to avoid it. The key to avoiding spam is prevention. Keep your email addresses as secret as possible by using CAPTCHA’d contact forms and if you really have to show an email address then take some measures to prevent it from being harvested.

After advising friends and family on how to avoid spam and them seeing a drastic reduction in the amount of spam they got, I decided to put down what I’d found into a guide…

How to Avoid Spam

How to Avoid Spam is a 40+ page PDF ebook on the topic of spam; what it is, why you get it, how to spot it and importantly how to avoid it. It also comes with an email encoder desktop application to make your email safer to publish online.

The ebook bundle is just $7 and you can promote it to others and claim 100% of each sale. The email encoder application displays a brandable link back to the sales page so you can give that away to people to use for free. If they should click on the link and make a purchase you’ll receive the proceeds of the sale!

How to Avoid Spam Contents

Here’s the table of contents from the ebook:

Introduction	5
Chapter 1: Spam - What is it?	6
Chapter 2: How Spammers Get Your Email Address	8
    Harvesters    8
    Good Spam    8
    Not Hiding Your Email Address Properly    9
    Reporting spam    10
Chapter 3: Email harvesting techniques    11
    Dictionary or Brute Force    11
    Web harvesting    11
    Usenet newsgroup harvesting    12
    Email lists    13
    Web browser leaks    13
Chapter 4: Once They Have Your Email Address    14
    How to beat spammers    14
    Why you shouldn't open or even preview suspected email    14
Chapter 5: Prevention - Tactics to Avoid Being Spammed    16
    Don't publish your email address in plain text    16
    Encode your mailto link with JavaScript    16
    Encode your mailto link with Character Entity encoding    17
    Display your email address as an image    18
    Display your email address as a flash animation    18
    Display your email address so only a human reader will understand    18
    Use a server-based contact form.    18
    Be careful with who you give your email address to    23
    Use a free email account if you absolutely must provide a real email address    23
    Use email forwarding (redirection)    24
    Domain registration details    25
    Screen Your Email    26
    Educate Your Friends and Colleagues    26
    Challenge-Response    26
Chapter 6: Cure - How to Rescue An Email Address From Spam Hell    29
    Server-based spam filtering    30
    PC-based spam filtering    30
    Bayesian filtering    32
    Using a Desktop Based Email Filter    34
    What's The Best Type of Filtering?    34
Chapter 7: Why Do Spammers Spam?    36
    Scams    36
Chapter 8: Don't Get Classed As a Spammer    39
Final words    40
Appendix A – Anti-Spam Resources    41
Anti-Spam Information    41
Internet Tools    41
PC-based Spam Filtering Applications    42
Server-based Spam Filtering    42
Bayesian Filtering    42
Challenge-Response Systems    42
Encoders    43
Obfuscation    43
Contact Forms    43
Spam Statistics    43
Email Harvester Poison    43
Email Clients    43
Glossary    45

Get your copy of How to Avoid Spam today and get ready to say goodbye to spam!

Over on the right-hand column, you might notice I’ve rearranged some of the content boxes and added a new one called, Share the Love.

This new content box allows you to buy links on this very blog for just $5! That’s $5 for traffic, link popularity, link juice, link love, whatever you want to call it.

Only a maximum number of 10 links will be shown at any one time so when link number 11 comes in, link 1 will be bumped off the list (FIFO).

Thanks to Gary for supplying the EZ Linkz script.

Has your WordPress blog ever started behaving strangely for no apparent reason? Yesterday, this blog was working as it should, but this morning, the very bottom of the sidebar and footer refused to load. Also, images weren’t always displaying in Internet Explorer.

As first, I thought it might have been a problem with a third party website as I use code from the likes of YouTube, Digg, BlogTopSites and Alexa. So, I tried to localise the problem by eliminating each bit of third party code in turn, but each time, the page would still cut off part way through the side bar.

I then checked the .htaccess to see if there was anything obvious in there that might be causing the problem. There wasn’t. I then checked the server to see if there was a problem with load or with any other PHP/MySQL websites. Everything looked fine.

After checking via another PC and a local install of this template with all of the third party code in place, I decided to upload a fresh copy of the WordPress script. Lo and behold, that worked!

There’s lesson for you. If your WordPress installation starts misbehaving for no apparent reason, try re-uploading the source code and save yourself some time!

The Chances are you already know what Camtasia Studio is. Just in case you don’t, it’s a screen recording, editing and production suite that lets you create multimedia presentations for a multitude of platforms.

Camtasia Studio is especially popular with Internet marketers who use it for everything from creating training videos to delivering sales pitches, but you don’t have to be one in order to benefit from using it. For example, screen recordings make it very easy to submit bug reports or ask for technical assistance. Instead of struggling trying to put the rights words together, just record what happens on your screen, upload the video and email a link to your support representative.

Bundled with December’s edition of PC Plus magazine (issue 262) is a free license for Camtasia Studio version 3. The latest version is 5, but version 3 is more than adequate for most needs.

If you intend to buy version 5 then you’ll be pleased to know that you can upgrade to it from this version 3 for less than the cost of buying version 5. So that’s v3 for free and v5 for about half-price!

You probably already know that search engines send out their spiders (aka robots) out to websites in order to index their content into their search databases so you should already appreciate the importance of having content that is easily accessible to spiders, but what do you do if you’re not sure how visible your content actually is?

Perhaps you rely on JavaScript, frames or multiple URL query strings to present content. How do you know whether your content can be easily read by search engine spiders?

If search engine spiders can’t get access to your website content then you can’t expect them to be able to return that content in search results. If organic search engine traffic is important to you then you must ensure your content can be spidered fully.

Here are some ways in which you can get an idea of what the spiders see:

1. Use a search engine’s cache in order to view your website pages as they’ve recorded them. If all of the content that should be on your webpages is visible in the cached pages then you know it’s visible to the spiders.
2. Use a text-based web browser such as Lynx to view your website. Click on the thumbnail above to see what this website looks like through Lynx.
3. Use an online text browser simulator to view your website.
4. Use a search engine spider emulator.
5. Search for content you want to check. If you can find it through a search engine then you know it’s visible!

Apart from actually using the search engines themselves, how accurate these methods are at representing what spiders see is questionable. Search engines are known for their veil of secrecy and search technology is ever-evolving. What search engine spiders can’t see today they might see tomorrow.  Sounds like the strap line for a horror movie…