| LED Digest 1840: Press Release Tips, Outbound Filtering too |
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================================================== 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 15, 2004 Issue #1840 ................................................ .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Download Sites for Marketing ==-- ~ John Smart "Which takes us to our old fall-backs in marketing - well written press releases..." --== Site Redesign Blues ==-- ~ Kathryn Martyn "I think it's important to be able to 'read' code..." --== The End of Email as You Know It? ==-- ~ Trevor Johnson "We are still actively working on promoting outbound filtering..." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Random Spam Email ==-- ~ Ajeet Khurana ~ Bob Gladstein --== Lost Email Address ==-- ~ Dennis Taylor ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: John Smart Subject: Download sites > Does anyone have experience of using shareware > download sites for marketing? - Rob Palmer, LED 1838 Getting a freeware or shareware product "out there" is going to be mostly the as a paid for program, I would have thought. Sure, you can submit it to the sites that handle shareware, freeware and open source -- Cnet, resourceindex.com, freshmeat.net, sourceforge.com etc but a lot of those type of sites have a tight following -- even though that may be tens of thousands of people, it is very focused. Which takes us to our old fall-backs in marketing -- well written press releases to the right places -- magazines that will be genuinely interested in what you are offering. Your press release should be one page -- maybe with a second for technical details. I used to be an editor at a news distribution agency (at the time it was the second largest in the world!) I read too many press releases each day. If the headline didn't interest me, and the 1st sentence didn't interest me it went in the trash. Oh -- include freebies! If you send something that will be wanted (not a fridge magnet or a pen -- on behalf of editors everywhere I beg you not to send that sort of thing!) and that is at least slightly relevant! Freebies that have been worth talking about have included a pen (it vibrated -- very silly and the only exception to the pen rule!), stress balls and blank floppy disks with holographic logos on them (I guess today it would have to be CD's!). It doesn't have to cost much but it can really work well! I seem to have distracted myself a little with a stroll down memory lane, but the information is still valid! I hope it helps some of you. Now I need to go and write a press release myself - but seeing as I am here, could I interest any of you in a... John Smart, Technical Director InternetDesign.com - A Human Touch in a Digital World -------- new post - new topic ------- From: Kathryn Martyn Subject: Redesign blues > ... HTML is far simpler to learn than learning your fourth > grade "times tables." I've yet to find someone who couldn't > be moderately proficient in two weeks using something > such as the "HTML for Dummies" publication... - Bill Davison, LED 1838 I can't imagine anyone requiring 20 hours to learn HTML! I learned the basics from a magazine article while on a sailing trip without a computer. It's so ridiculously simple - it only gets tricky when you start playing with tables, etc., and even those aren't hard, you just have to be able to keep your wits about you as you start to get deeper and deeper in brackets. Here are the basics: Tags are enclosed in brackets <tag>. Tags are opened with the ordinary bracket, and closed with a </tag> (bracket with a slash). HTML pages begin with <.html> and end with <./html>. See? Open, close. I think once that concept is clear, then it's smooth sailing. I think it's important to be able to "read" code so if things are not displaying correctly you can go take a look at what might be the problem. Outside of that I use Dreamweaver - I used something called NetObjects Fusion a long time ago. I loved it, but the code was full of crap (it created spacers for you so you could drag things around) so I stopped using it. I wish there were something similar that would produce clean code at the end - it was so easy to design by dragging things around the screen. I only wish CSS were so simple! I'm having a bear of a time getting my head around that, and I'm still looking for someone to tutor me in Perl. So much to learn. Kathryn Martyn, M.NLP Ending Emotional Eating, One Bite at a Time http://www.onemorebite-weightloss.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Trevor Johnson Subject: End of Email & Outbound Filtering > I know this must be a stupid question, but why aren't mail > servers configured to detect and delete spam / viruses / > worms on out-going mail rather than incoming mail? - Brett Swooshman, LED 1838 No Brett, it is NOT a stupid question. In fact, for over four years BestPrac.Org, the anti-spam organization committed to promoting industry level best practice in technical and ethical standards to prevent spam has been promoting outbound filtering (amongst many other standards, some of which have been readily embraced by the ISP community, others being adopted at a much slower pace). A growing number, albeit it far too small, of ISPs and other email service providers are adopting rate-limiting technologies on their outbound servers. The real question, and you've already asked it, Brett, is why aren't ALL ISPs doing this? Do dial-up or even home broadband users really need the ability to send 100 million spams a day on an account? Of course not. Place a realistic outgoing limit on standard accounts (say, 200 emails per day on home accounts, for example), and no spammer will ever use that ISP again. Such a policy will also strongly limit the current major demon of the internet, being "zombie PCs". That is, virus infected users whose machines are hijacked by spammers to send out spam from other user's machines and accounts. I know of a handful of web hosting services who even implement rate limiting on web server accounts. Recognising that business are likely to have a higher legitimate need to send correspondence than home users, they offer 1,000 email per day capacity. If a customer wants higher capacity, the customer must pay for access and use of a special mailing list server. Outbound filtering (virus, content and rate limiting) is the great hope for truly major impact on reducing the spam plagues. The question remains, as Brett asked, why isn't it more common? Why is it that maybe only 1% of ISPs utilize such technology and abide by the relevent 'Principles of Best Practice'? The probable answer: The profit motive, from at least two different angles. Firstly, ISPs and web hosts (and other service providers) make money by selling bandwidth or service access. They are therefore reluctant to discourage even illegitimate users - until the complaints start arriving. Secondly, software companies who develop filtering technologies know that for each ISP or hosting service, there are probably an average of 100,000 end users. They'd prefer to develop "solutions" for the massive market of end users than for the much smaller originating server market. BestPrac.Org has been successful in initiating many standards that are now in wide use. For instance, web-bug blocking was a Best Practice standard that has been adopted quite widely by various free web-email providers and now email client software. We are still actively working on promoting outbound filtering as a major step towards the elimination of spam worldwide. Interestingly, once again it is largely the free web-based email services who are leading the way in adoption of the Principle. Trevor Johnson, Chairman BestPrac.Org http://www.bestprac.org ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: Ajeet Khurana Subject: Random email > I have been receiving spam emails that have strange strings > of words at the beginning and/or ending of the email. - Diane Dennis, LED 1839 Hi Diane, The bad guys always try to stay a step ahead of the good guys. Good guys catch up and then the bad guys discover a new trick. In this case, the SPAM mailing software includes a different set of random words in different emails. The idea is that if a SPAM filter is set to detect a large number of identical mails, it is more likely to tag that as SPAM. So, these random words make the emails look customized. Some SPAMmers will also use randomized FROM addresses for a similar reason. Though SPAM filters are getting smarter, the bad guys are too. Best of luck to all of us. The future of effective emailing is at stake. Ajeet Khurana http://search-engines.allinfoabout.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Bob Gladstein Subject: Random email It's just an attempt to slip past spam filters. By adding a bunch of random text, they're decreasing the percentage within the message of words that trip the filter and mark the message as junk. It's not an attempt to emulate Finnegan's Wake. I read somewhere about a museum exhibition in New York a few months ago that included some of this "found art," however. Some of them are kind of amusing, in a random sort of way. Bob Gladstein Raise My Rank SEO Services http://www.raisemyrank.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Dennis Taylor Subject: Lost e-mail address A few days ago, I received an e-mail from someone who had read one of my posts and noted that they had grown up in this area (Indian River County in Florida), but now lived in New Jersey. I did not answer them immediately and now I seem to have lost the e-mail along with, of course, their address. If they would write to me again (dhtaylor4, msn.com) I will reply. Thanks, Adam. If you can post this, I'd appreciate it. Dennis Taylor ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." - Albert Einstein |
