The 4 Ws of Junk E-mail by Niall Roche

The 4 Ws of Junk E-mail by Niall Roche

Junk e-mail or spam has become the scourge of the modern computer world. It eats bandwidth. Spam is like a disease. It doesnt care about age, religion, wealth. It doesnt discriminate. Junk e-mail affects us all.

There are 4 keys to the junk mail questionWho, What, Where and Why.

Who they are
The typical profile of a junk mail sender is as follows. Male, 1830 years of age, single, technically competent and with little regard for their status as a public nuisance. There are female junk mailers out there but, unfortunately, this is predominantly a male preserve.

What they use to send spam
There are many tools available to the spam merchant. The main ones are e-mail extractors, newsgroup harvesters and CD lists.

E-mail extractors are programs which wander around the Internet gathering e-mail addresses from websites and often from web based forums (unprotected forums). A good e-mail extractor can gather 15,000 e-mail addresses per hour.

Newsgroup harvesters are programs which search through newsgroups for valid e-mail addresses. Most newsgroups users are aware of this and take measures to counteract these harvesting programs. Despite these measures a newsgroup harvester application can gather 20,00030,000 e-mail addresses in an hour.

CD lists are one of the worst sources. 90 million e-mail addresses available on a single CD for as little as $20. A lot of the addresses on these CDs would be junk (many would no longer exist) but an equally large number of these addresses would be valid. A CD like this is a junk mailers dream.

Where they do it from
Those involved in sending out bulk e-mail are entrepreneurs or at least they think so. The vast majority of those involved in the spam business are self-employed and work from home. Sending spam is almost the ideal home based business. You name your hours and the business itself is almost automatic. Maximum gain from minimum effort.

Why they do it in the first place
Their motivation is money. Considerable amounts of cash actually. Each spammer who sends out 1,000,000 junk e-mails is certain of approximately 100 sales. Many of the products they sell are worth $50 - $100 dollars to them in commission. Yes. Shocking isnt it? The average bulk mailer earns in excess of $100,000 per year! Maximum return for minimum effort. Unless of course you get caught and get jail time.

About the Author
Niall Roche is the content administrator for www.spam-site.com. For more information on ways to fight spam check out http://www.spam-site.com/spam_filter_reviews/spam_filter_reviews.htm.

RSS Feeds by Sharon Housley

RSS Feeds by Sharon Housley

Lets face it as much as we all rely on email communications it is not really a reliable technology.

Why Should I care about RSS Feeds
SPAM and viruses have wreaked havoc with a communication medium and reduced its value. Users have become admittedly paranoid about privacy issues and have begun "tuning out" and mentally filtering mail. What this means is that vendors really ought to begin exploring alternatives means of communciation in order to be heard. One of these alternatives is RSS or Really Simple Syndication.

While I'm not suggesting that you abandon email I think that many might want to consider RSS feeds as well. Because RSS Feeds are selected by the end user spam is not an issue. RSS is created using XML, a very basic markup language. One that does not contain the risks inherent to email.

Endusers select the feeds they wish to view. Content providers select the feeds they wish to display. By providing a RSS feed another site may pick up "news" about your software and post it. If email continues on a self destruct course RSS will become a new standard and an accepted viable alternative or more likely an email supplement. For now if you have a "technical" customer base RSS might be a "cool" thing to add.

What are RSS Feeds -
In very simple non-technical terms RSS is an XML file containing a directory of web pages with related news or information. The RSS is contained in an XML file and referred to as a "feed". RSS format is very simple, in fact even I was able to create a feed with little effort.

The XML file basically contains what would be commonly used as a title and description in an html document, along with the url of a web page containing the actual content.

Sample feeds can be seen at: http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com/feed.xml http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com/marketing-feed.xml http://www.notepage.net/feed.xml

Once uploaded to a website the feed should be validated (to make sure you did not use any invalid characters). The feed can then be submitted to engines. Individuals can view your content in a reader. Individuals can also add news feed to their websites by using an aggregator and tapping the feed of news vendors or others.

For convenience I've created a webpage with RSS resources at http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com/rss-feeds.html


About the Author
Sharon Housley manages marketing for NotePage, Inc.
http://www.notepage.net a company specializing in
alphanumeric paging, SMS wireless messaging software solutions.