| LED Digest 1837: Unsolicited Un-commercial Email? |
|
|
|
================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam,led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ................................................ July 12, 2004 Issue #1837 ................................................ .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Site Redesign Blues ==-- ~ Veronica Yuill "...both [FP and DW] produce code that's as good as you'd expect from a WYSIWYG editor..." ~ Marsha Kopan "I liken learning HTML to learning short hand..." --== Using Affiliate Services ==-- ~ Vicki Lambert "Actually you can send an e-mail to the IRS..." ~ Steve Kassel "Any affiliate living in the U.S. to whom you pay $600 or more must be issued a 1099." --== The End of Email as You Know It? ==-- ~ John Barendrecht "Let me introduce you to a new form of spam, Unsolicited UnCommercial E-mail." ~ Tom Aman "...too bad there was not some way to ensure everyone ran decent virus software..." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Page Layout ==-- ~ Charles Oertel --== Email & Browser Alternatives to MS ==-- ~ Joao Pereira ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Veronica Yuill Subject: Redesign blues > ... I appreciate that some of my problems may be due to > incorrect settings in FrontPage - but these settings always > seem to be incorrect in my version, and in the versions of > my clients (I do not install the software for them). - John Smart, LED 1836 It's true that you do need to tweak FP's default settings a little to get it to produce really good, cross-browser code, and you need to know what you're doing (which many users of FP unfortunately don't!). Having used both Dreamweaver and FP, I'd say that when used correctly, both produce code that's as good as you'd expect from a WYSIWYG editor, i.e. not very ;-) -- spoken by a long-time hand-coder <g>. Much of the bloat wrongly blamed on FP is caused by cutting and pasting from Word, which inserts all its own horrible "round-trip" XML coding by default. This does indeed double the file size without providing any benefit. When pasting from Word, always use Paste Special / Paste as Text, and you won't have this problem. Veronica Yuill Archetype Information Technology Ltd http://www.archetype-it.com/english/ ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Marsha Kopan Subject: Redesign blues I started using FP95 and now I'm up to FP2000 and must say that I do not use it for personal websites. My client's sites are not e-commerce. Yes, the HTML in FP may be odd to HTML purists... but if the site looks good, gets high rankings in the SEs and works for the public don't knock it. I liken learning HTML to learning short hand. It's not something that everyone needs to know to do the job. Marsha Kopan, IVAA CVA Executive Secretarial Services www.execsecsrv.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Vicki Lambert Subject: Affiliates > My next question is how do I handle my overseas affiliates? > Do I send them a 1099? Their systems of taxation is very > different from ours. They don't have social security numbers. - Mary Lee LED 1834 Actually you can send an e-mail to the IRS (see contact us on the site) and e-mail the question. They will respond within one or two days and you have the response in writing which will hold up if a "discussion" occurs down the line. The IRS is not responsible for any comments made on the phone. Vicki Lambert ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Steven H. Kassel Subject: Affiliates Any affiliate living in the U.S. to whom you pay $600 or more must be issued a 1099. Additional, any American citizen overseas to whom you pay $600 or more must also be issued a 1099. There is no need to issue a 1099 to anyone who is neither an American citizen nor lives within the United States. There are practical problems in determining which affiliates should be issued 1099s. The best way to handle it would be to get a Social Security Number at the time they become an affiliate. If the affiliate lives in the U.S., you can require a SSN concurrent with becoming an affiliate. You could construct a form which asks those residing outside of the U.S., "of what country are you a citizen?" BTW, thanks to Deke Hammel of AmishHosting.com for recommending that you see an Enrolled Agent (EA) to handle your tax needs. You can find information on what an EA is at the National Association of Enrolled Agents site at: http://www.naea.org/tax-abouteas.cfm Steve Kassel, EA, Founder & CEO Taxes.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: John Barendrecht Subject: End of Email > ... for a piece of Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail to be > worth the trouble of sending, there must be a way to > get back to the advertiser in order to spend money. - Daniel Lance Herrick, LED 1836 Let me introduce you to a new form of spam, Unsolicited UnCommercial E-mail. They have a political agenda and the links (if any) are to online newspapers. One of these faked my address as the "From" and I received over 700 bounces in 2 days. The message was in German, so I searched the net and found this Wired news story: -------------------- "... a spammer flooded their inboxes with nationalist, borderline-racist propaganda in German. "... the senders have another thing going for them: They're not leaving a money trail." http://snipurl.com/70vo [wired.com] -------------------- What do you think of these new proposals to fight spam? Microsoft and Yahoo welcomed each others' proposals for fighting spam: http://snipurl.com/7g8u [wired.com] Best regards, John Barendrecht videoridge.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Tom Aman Subject: End of Email > A lot of the stuff clogging our mailboxes is outlook viruses and > worms trying to propogate themselves. The fixes for that are more > complicated. > > However, for a piece of Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail to be worth > the trouble of sending, there must be a way to get back to the > advertiser in order to spend money. Often that way is a web site. > The web site has an IP address ("nslookup domainname" at the command > prompt is one way to learn the IP address). > > There are registries from whom the ISPs obtain the IP addresses. If > the IP address came from ARIN, ... - Daniel Lance Herrick, LED 1835 Regarding viruses and worms trying to propogate themselves, too bad there was not some way to ensure everyone on the Internet ran decent virus scanning software to stop these in their tracks. I guess all of us who do can only spread the gospel every chance we get. I use McAfee software and it scans everything coming into my system. It traps a worm or virus included in an attachment two or three times a week (of course I would never open an attachment anyway unless I was reasonably certain of the contents). It also occasionally picks up a Web page that could potentially cause a problem (like a page that does not allow itself to be closed). So if any LEDer is not running virus scanning / trapping software, do yourself (and the rest of us) a big favor and install something on your system. And just as important, keep it up to date. It is not at all unusual for McAfee to send 2 or 3 or more updates a week - sometime more than one in the same day - whenever a new threat is identified. As for looking up domains and IP address information, instead of trying various "whois" sites, try a site like www.dnsstuff.com. It will let you do a variety of lookups, including domain name or IP address, abuse contact for a domain, spam database (see if a mail server is listed in a database of 150+ known spam sources), etc. If they cannot supply the results directly, they will redirect you to the appropriate site. And as Daniel is suggesting, take time to send a complaint / report. Maybe you can't deal with all the SPAM all the time, but do invest 5 or 10 minutes a day. It is worth it and it can make a difference. Bear in mind that if an ISP gets one email complaining, it will probably be ignored, if the ISP gets 1000 or more, action becomes very likely (except in those rare cases where the ISP truly does not care). Tom Aman Aman Software http://www.cyberspyder.com amant, cyberspyder.com ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: Charles Oertel Subject: Layout > I've just learned that I can make graphics "float" on a page, and > have the text wrap around it (no longer need to use tables!!!); but > is there a way to do the same kind of thing with a block of text? - Tom Anson, LED 1835 Put the text in a 'div' and give it a style that makes it float. If you use styles you can drop tables altogether from your entire site. For example: <.div style="float:right; width:50%; margin:.5em; border:1px solid gray; padding:.5em; background:silver;"> This text should float right in a box that is silver with a dark-gray border, and take up half the width of the text that will wrap around it. <./div> <.p>This text will wrap around the div above. The first two parts of the style in the div are the most important: tell the box to float right, and also make it a given width (otherwise it will go right across the screen.<./p> Perhaps you should visit alistapart.com for some more information about using styles and not tables. HTH regards Charles Oertel FineBushPeople.co.za ------- new post - new topic -------- From: Joao Pereira Subject: Email programs > The safest way to preserve email archives is in a form as close > to the wire protocol as possible, because then you can recover > mail by effectively resending it. mbox format is good. - Kent Crispin, LED 1836 Being a computer expert for more than 10 years, I never stop surprising myself at how difficult it is to import / export mail from one message program to another. I've migrated between Mozilla, Eudora, Outlook and finally Thunderbird. None of them seem to assure 100% accuracy and I've had some catastrophic results in the past. One technique I've become accustomed is to transfer the mail through a IMAP account. I will setup a temporary mail server on my PC or in one of the other PC's at work and add a new account for it to the old email program. After passing all the messages to the IMAP folders (remember to make a backup of your mail before), I'll open the new email client, add the IMAP account and move the messages from the IMAP folders to the local ones. This usually works fine, and you can expect more than 98% of the messages to be transfered. You may have some problems with some messages having exotic mime encodings but otherwise you'll be ok. Good luck, Joao Pereira joao.pereira, dotinspired.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest." - Henry Miller |
