| LED Digest 2299: Ahoy! Search Engine Land |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Registration 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 .............................................. December 1, 2006 Issue no. 2299 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ===================== <Moderator Comment> ~ Ahoy! Search Engine Land ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Transactional Emails Being Ignored? ==-- ~ Tom Aman "...even one false positive that automatically ends up being deleted or bounced is one too many." ~ Joe Halbrook "...false positives are never going to be reduced to zero." ~ Beth Earle "Better spam-blocking software...is the answer, but who's going to provide it?" ~ John Smart "...this is a problem I am very aware of." --== The Email Crisis ==-- ~ Shel Horowitz "I won't use challenge-response...people won't bother, and I'm the one who loses out." ~ Joe Halbrook "I hate challenge-response systems." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Yahoo Blocking Newsletter ==-- ~ Tom Anson ========== NEW =================================== <Moderator Comment> Greetings LEDer, I'm sure you've heard all about Danny Sullivan leaving Search Engine Watch and starting up his own gig (called Search Engine Land - from the "watch" to the "land"). Yesterday he left his final post at the SEW blog. I remember when my family's company, Multimedia Marketing Group, flew Danny from the UK to our little redneck town in Oregon to teach the company search optimization. My dad still swears that they invented the term "search engine optimization" that day! I think that was in 1997 or thereabouts. And I remember working for MSN bCentral and getting posts from Danny often. I found 9 posts from him in the LED archives. That was when he was building SEW. Best of luck to your future at the land of search, Danny. -Adam PS: Unfortunately I only have archives for the LED going back to early 2000. Anyone have issues from earlier than that? If you do I'd love to talk with you. I'll need those eventually to build out the led-digest.com site. ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Tom Aman Subject: False positives - confirmation messages > What percentage of the emails that you send end up > in black holes and junk folders? What does this cost > you in lost business? While all the major providers of > spam filter technology claim fantastic accuracy, I would > be interested to know what LEDs think. - Adrian McElligott, LED Digest 2298 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1384/55/ Regardless of their accuracy, all filters miss sometimes and I feel that even one false positive that automatically ends up being deleted or bounced is one too many. Aside from lost business, the filtered email may be of importance for other reasons. For instance, I have recently been dealing with the problem of my feedback form being used to attempt to send SPAM (I will be posting on this subject soon), either to send SPAM to me or to attempt to send SPAM to others. My CGI process is designed to prevent the form from being used to send SPAM to others, so mostly this is only a minor annoyance. The process is also set up to capture as much info as possible about the sender so I end up with the originator's IP address as well as the exact time of the event. A quick lookup gives me the IP address owner. Often this is an ISP, but sometimes the source is a business or institution whose system is being used. Sometimes when I attempt to let the site owners know about the problem, including a complete copy of the data, their SPAM filter will reject the message (probably because part of the info appears as the SPAM that it is). The most recent site was Fairfax County Public Schools, VA, USA. If I do not take the time follow up with another message (as I did for this one), it means their system will continue to be used for this purpose. Tom Aman Aman Software -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Joe Halbrook Subject: Confirm messages > Are BrightMail and the like doing a good job under > the circumstances, or should they be doing more to > reduce their false positive rate? - Adrian McElligott, LED Digest 2298 Adrian brings up extremely relevant questions here. The answers, unfortunately, are not as cut and dry as we all want them to be. Are the major solutions "doing a good job under the circumstances?" That's a question that results in individual answers, because no one mailbox content is identical to another. What might work well for you may not work well for me. With existing technologies, false positives are never going to be reduced to zero. Why? Because no technology can perfectly emulate the human process that you and I use to define "unwanted email." So, if a solution provider claims a zero false positive rate, I'd have to question that statement; there's no such solution in existence that can guarantee 100% accuracy, to my knowledge. Thus, this question becomes refined to: How do present technologies provide easy false positive identification and retrieval? In the case of my solution, an email report (generated multiple times per day) is delivered to the recipient's mailbox. The report consists of a brief summary of each filtered message - accompanied by three clickable links per filtered message: 1- Read the Message 2- Restore the Message to Mailbox 3- Whitelist the Sender, then Restore to Mailbox. (Using the latter link, future email from the Sender will never be filtered again, as the Sender's email address is appended to the whitelist.) At the end of the report, there's a link to delete all remaining filtered email items. The report is not bulky, and can easily be used on a Treo, if need be. Thus, all filtered email (including any false positives) can be managed right from the mailbox itself. The reports can be generated on-demand, or they can be configured to generate multiple times a day. Most filtering solutions provide some sort of quarantine for questionable email, and a mechanism for reviewing and retrieving email items from the quarantine. I'd be interested in following how Geobytes progresses in developing a companion program to accomplish this. I do think there is a need, depending on the filtering solution being used. Joe Halbrook http://www.cleanmymailbox.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Beth Ann Earle Subject: Confirm messages Honestly, I think Adam hit the nail on the head in the 2296 LED from Tuesday when he wrote, "Confirmation messages are routinely filtered by ISPs and email providers as false-positives." Granted, there always have been problems with people not replying to opt-in confirmation emails or other transactional email. But the biggest issue by far seems to be that the confirmation messages simply aren't getting through to their intended recipients because of tightening spam controls on the part of ISPs and email hosts. And, if that is the case, then providing spam-folder mining software or really valuable incentives isn't going to solve the problem. Better spam-blocking software for use by ISPs and email hosts is the answer, but who's going to provide it? I certainly can't. But I do hope that someone else can. We all need it. With the best LED'ly regards to all, Beth Earle www.pilotfishseo.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: John Smart Subject: Confirm messages Having just finished the code for a double-opt in list, this is a problem I am very aware of. When companies like Earthlink do all they do in the interest of spam prevention, getting EarthLinkers involved is almost impossible. Not much better for any of the big boys -- AOL, MSN, hotmail --gmail is a good bet -- so far. I am looking at a new approach, but it is not so automated. This is the flow chart for it: Sign up for mailing list with your name and e-Mail address. Confirmation page contains a code snippet like this: <.a xhref="mailto: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it ?subject=sign up&body=http://www.domain.com/confirm.php?uid=897398jkhkjh23uiy78d6" >Click here to send the mail to confirm you want to opt in.<./a> Person signing up sends the mail, letting their network know that they are communicating with you Moderator gets the mail, clicks the link, Mail is sent back, confirming subscription, testing it all worked. Mail that is sent back has an opt out link in it, to avoid system abuse. It is possible to abuse this system, and the moderator (or someone else) will need to click the links to activate the code so it isn't as automated as I would like. But when the 1st mail goes from recipient to the moderator and that opens the door for many of the spam filters. Hope that helps, John Smart InternetDesign.com - A Human Touch in a Digital World -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Shel Horowitz Subject: Email Crisis Joe [Halbrook], thanks for your advice. I actually turned off the catch-alls years ago. Sooner or later, I'm going to bite the bullet and simply change all my e-addresses -- but so many people have them! I went to your site. I have trouble with systems that block all unknown senders, because I get plenty of important mail from people who haven't previously contacted me -- including most of my clients! For similar reasons, I won't use challenge-response. Important people won't bother, and I'm the one who loses out. Shel Horowitz http://www.frugalmarketing.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Joe Halbrook Subject: Email filtering Hi Shel. I wanted to let you know how I handle business contacts using my CleanMyMailbox solution. I hate challenge-response systems. There's no worse "first-impression" than making your potential customers "work for you" right up front! I personally don't trust email for my business contacts, so I converted all my web site contact forms to append messages to secure RSS feeds (one for each form) anytime someone contacts me using one of those contact forms. I developed the solution myself, and have not gone public with it. Of course, I don't publish an email address on any of my web sites. And, yes, it can be a hassle to remember to whitelist someone, if I switch over to using email after that initial RSS contact. But, for me, the volume is low, so it's not a problem. However, my CleanMyMailbox service provides a feature to allow you to configure incoming emails that come from a web site contact form to automatically whitelist and never filter those Senders (assuming you capture their email address from the contact form). Most contact forms require an email address. Thus, even if I used email from those forms, it wouldn't filter any of the resulting emails, and the Senders would always get whitelisted the first time they contacted me, so no future filtering either. Problem solved. How is this done? You have to configure the CGI script that your web site contact form calls (form action=) to use a special string in the subject line of all emails that you get from that form. Then, in the Subject Line Whitelist in my filtering service, I add an auto-whitelist entry for that special string, and viola! The only reason I switched to RSS on my contact forms, is because of the threat of spammers using my contact forms to send spam email to thousands of people! I actually caught quite a few of them attempting to do so - after I switched to RSS, but that stopped them cold. :-) They can spam my RSS feed (one time), but they can't send any spam to anyone else under my name! I wouldn't risk filtering a "good" contact, and the solution I came up with for forms that send email has worked flawlessly for my clients for years now. Please keep in touch, Shel, if you have any questions or if there's anything I can do to help out. Thank you. Joe Halbrook ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Tom Anson Subject: Mailings blocked by Yahoo! Hi fellow LEDers, I sent out my email newsletter last night. I have a list of about (don't laugh) 700 opt-in recipients -- small, but growing quite rapidly. But I ran into a problem: Yahoo! blocked about 50 of those emails. Here is the error message I received (over and over again): Fallback from host 'yahoo.com'. Generated in method 'Net::Email::_rcpt'. Reason for fallback: '452: Too many recipients': I took a look at the Yahoo! website to see if there was any way to contact them about this, but I couldn't see anything. Does anyone have any ideas on what I can do to get this problem fixed? I understand Yahoo!'s concern about spam, and having 50 or more emails from one place hitting their system at once can look like spam; but this is opt-in, and as far as I know, there have been no complaints against me. I mean, what do they do with Mercola.com? Mercola has a mailing list in the hundreds of thousands -- just for Yahoo! addresses. There must be a way around this. Your help, please. Tom Anson Anson Aromatic Essentials http://www.therapeutic-grade.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2006 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it." - George Santayana |
