Spam fighting & email management

From: Rod Aries <subscribeme_at_usa.net>
Date: Sat 05 Aug 2000 07:52:36 -0700

> 1. The cost of one additional email to a person in the
> USA who is not paying for connect time is zilch. In any
> case, an email takes half a second or less of connect
> time.

Hmm, half-second... I will share with you what I do to
try and save that half second, and then re-invest it to
save future half-seconds.

I also get pretty annoyed and have instituted several
measures to fight back. The first part of this email
are some things I do help better manage my inbox. The
very last item is what you can do to help stop
spammers.

I have numerous active domains and receive about 400+
emails a day -- a fair amount of which is spam. Here
are a few things I did to try and achieve less than a
half a second of my time:

1) using distinct emails to post (post@###.com) in new
places, to sign up for newsletters (subscribe@###.com),
to receive requests from my web sites
(atyourservice@###.com), to receive mail from friends
(rod@###.com), to submit web pages to search engines
(submit@###.com- we have weeks where we produce nearly
1,000 web pages for clients and then submit them to the
10 major portals (10,000 submissions), so any thing we
can do to help sort and route goes a long way).

2) set my Eudora filters to screen the above addresses
- some I do color coded, some I filter to a new folder.
So I can look down my in box (and sort by label if need
be) and see green for inquiries, red for spam, etc

3) set additional Eudora filters to attempt to screen
spam by searching for phrases like:
this is not spam or
Section 301, Paragraph (a quoted 'legal' source) or
1618 TITLE III (a quoted 'legal' source) or
if the Subject contains a $

These automatically go into a spam folder, which I then
quickly scan just to be sure no one by mistake snuck
in. I then select all emails at once in this folder and
hit DELETE, average about a half second per 25 emails
:))

4. to improve my knowledge base I do the following...
If I read a posting about an interesting bit of news or
software or fact I copy the piece and email it to
myself with the subject "Newbies:" followed by something
descriptive such as:
Newbies: Software logs and tracking&nbsp; or
Newbies: software for meta tags or
Newbies: studies text more valuable than graphics

and then paste the source, the statement, followed by
my comments, if any.

I have the Newbies: set up as a template so i simply
copy the info, click the icon I created for Newbie:
then paste. Takes about 3-4 seconds. I now have about
4,500 emails sorted by internet marketing, web page
marketing, domain name management, software etc.

I then set up a filter to automatically put any email
from me AND with Newbies: in the subject to go into
the, surprise, Newbies folder. So when I sort by topic,
all the Newbies: internet marketing tidbits are all
adjacent.

In example:

NEWBIES: Studies text more valuable than graphics

SOURCE: http://www.poynter.org/eyetrack2000/

SOURCE QUOTE:
However, overall, during the entire online reading
session, graphics and photos did less well than text.
Of all graphics, aside from banner ads and photos,
available to a subject throughout a session, only 22
percent were looked at. Banner ads, which were broken
out separately from other graphics, did somewhat
better: 45 percent were looked at. And photos did best:
64 percent were looked at. These figures stack up
against briefs and articles text, which were looked at
82 and 92 percent of the time, respectively.
Articles text 92%
Briefs 82
Photos 64
Banner Ads 45
Graphics 22

MY COMMENTS: design for show - content for dough

Which I then use to update my site
http://www.howtointernet.com/net_copy_writing.html

LASTLY, I use SpamCop to report spammers.
http://spamcop.net/
It is free and I take that half second I saved by not
having to read spam, and use that half second now to
report spam. Hopefully, that makes it more difficult to
spam and may prevent a future spamming, saving me that
half second soon :)

At your service,
Rod Aries, How To Internet Your Business
Industrial Strength Search Engine Optimization
mailto:rod_at_howtointernet.com
http://www.howtointernet.com/?industrial





Received on Sat Aug 05 2000 - 09:52:36 CDT