Learn About Spam

Now I have moved all articles to WordPress, it took some copy/pasting but not that much. Lets see if we can get some new articles in here as well.

Q: I am so sick of all the spam that is sent to my business email address. I spend an hour every morning just trying to sort out the good email from the bad. I know I could just delete it all, but I’m afraid I’ll accidentally delete email that might be important to my business. Short of unplugging my computer, what’s the best solution for dealing with spam?

A: I feel your pain. I, too, miss the good old days when the only time you’d spend an hour dealing with spam was trying to pry it out of the can.

Due to the nature of my business, I get a lot of unwanted email. I’ve been working on the Internet since 1995 and my email address has been publicly exposed for most of that time, so I am a spammer’s delight. It is no exaggeration to say that I used to receive more than 400 email messages a day. Out of those 400 messages about 10% were from people I knew, 10% were from people I needed to know, and the rest were from people that I would like to track down and field dress with a very dull knife.

Spammers, they are called… the scourge of the Internet… the digital kin of the lowly telemarketer and dreaded junk mailer.

After listening to me complain about spam for months, my lead engineer burst into my office a few weeks ago and announced, “I’ve solved our spam problem! I’ve installed a spam filter on our server that will prevent spam from getting through.”

Great, I thought, now I can find something new to complain about.

I wondered what I would do with the extra two hours a day this wonderful spam filter would give me. My joy quickly waned when within a day my email went from 400 to 40. It was the saddest day of my life. Sitting there staring at my empty email box I suddenly felt very alone. At that moment I realized that not only had I come to expect the morning deluge of email, but I had come to find comfort in it. The spammers had become my friends. They wanted me to get rich quick and brighten my smile. They wanted to enhance my love life with generic Viagra and give me great deals on miniature cameras, low interest loans, waterfront property, and more. And the sheer number of folks concerned about the abundance (or lack thereof) of my anatomy was incredibly heart warming.

And the ladies that sent me email were so nice. They were worried that I was lonely and offered to cure my loneliness if only I gave them a credit card number. How sweet is that?

After a few days the withdrawal symptoms ceased and I was happy to be free of the majority of the spam, though to this day I’m afraid that I might be missing out on something grand.

You and I are not alone, Anna. According to a recent study by eMarketer, the average Internet email user now receives 81 emails a day, and nearly one quarter of them are spam. Spam now makes up more than 40% of all email and costs U.S. companies more than $10 billion annually. Seventy-six billion unsolicited e-mail messages will be delivered in 2003.

So how do spammers get your email address in the first place? It’s easier than you might think. While some spam comes as a result of online purchases (yes, there are companies that will sell your email address no matter what their privacy policy says), that’s just one of the ways spammers get you in their sites.

Spammers use “spider software” to crawl the web and harvest email address, so if you have a personal or company website that has your email posted on it, sooner or later a spam spider is going to grab your address and add it to the mill. Likewise when you sign up to take online surveys or receive email newsletters, you are potentially exposing yourself to spammers.

How can you reduce the amount of spam you get? Many people think that you can’t fight spam, so you should just accept it and move on. In other words, you can not fight the Borg, so smile and be assimilated into the fold. While spam is hard to eliminate, there are things you can do to lessen the amount of spam you receive and it’s impact on your daily business life.

First, stop clicking on the “unsubscribe” links at the bottom of spam emails. While some of the links are valid and will get you removed from spammer’s lists, other are actually there just to let the spammer know that your address is valid. Click the link to unsubscribe and you might actually see the amount of spam you receive increase.

Second, it’s a good idea to have at least two e-mail addresses. Use one for personal or business use, and the other for surveys and online purchases.

Third, consider installing a spam blocking software on your computer or company network. There are a variety of spam blocking applications on the market that range in price from free to a hundred bucks. Though none of them will completely eliminate spam, they can greatly reduce the volume you receive. Search the Web for “spam filter” and investigate the ones that you feel are right for you.

Your Internet Service Provider should also offer an anti-spam application, but be careful how you use it. I have a client who recently increased the sensitivity of their ISP spam blocker to the point that nothing was getting delivered to their company email accounts, including their own company newsletter. They had effectively built an email brick wall that stopped the spam and everything else. Not a good idea.

Before investing in a commercial spam blocker you might also try adjusting the email filtering settings in your email software. Microsoft Outlook, for example, lets you set rules for handling incoming mail. The same is true with Outlook Express, Eudora, and Apple’s Mail OSX. Each have built-in filtering features that can help eliminate unwanted email by parameters you set.

One thing to remember is that if spam didn’t work, it would quickly go away. In other words, if spammers weren’t profiting from sending unwanted emails they would go do something else.

Probably become a telemarketer or credit card debt collector.

Whether you use a commercial product or rely on your existing email software to filter out spam, just be careful that you don’t batten down the hatches so tight that you no longer receive any email at all.

Here’s to your success!

Tim Knox tim@dropshipwholesale.net

Author:
Tim Knox: Tim serves as the president and CEO of three successful technology companies and is the founder of DropshipWholesale.net. Related Links:
http://www.prosperityandprofits.com
http://www.smallbusinessqa.com
http://www.dropshipwholesale.net
http://www.30dayblueprint.com
http://www.timknox.com

Terms: Articles may be reprinted provided content is not edited and links are kept live
Source: www.articledepot.co.uk

I’ve got faith in humanity, but what’s with all this fraud and theft on the Internet?

My friends in the web hosting business have recently informed me that the big problem this year (2004) is security and fraud. I have read that currently the F.B.I. receives over 9,000 complaints per month pertaining to bogus email and websites. Why is this happening? Are just a few ‘bad apples’ doing it, or is it the result of a lopsided world economy where the underprivileged are finally striking back like the infamous Robin Hood? Whatever your moral view, I’ve got the strange feeling it stems from a growing unconscious greed in the social consciousness of modern society. People worship money, not spirituality or love. Am I wrong?

Technically, the main problems at the moment are ‘phishing’ or ‘spoofing’ scams. This is where the use of Spam or junk-email is used to lure computer users to look-alike websites where they are deceived into giving out personal information and financial data. Often these emails are coming from trusted sources where hackers have altered links to send you straight into their ‘pockets’. The Internet user is duped into thinking that they are visiting a trusted website page, when actually it is an excellent copy of the original. There might be only one tiny change in the web address that is often not easily recognizable.

Identity theft is where multiple tricks are employed to make you fill out fake forms on fake sites to get all sorts of information that can then be used by thieves to steal money or get free Internet access. Anything from credit card numbers to account information, passwords, billing data and personal phone numbers and addresses have been stolen and used for criminal purposes.

These tricksters, few or many, are wizards at finding loopholes in mail systems of legitimate sites. Just go to the site entitled www.crimesofpersuasion.com and read some articles about a few of the more famous scams that have been busted or that are still in circulation. There’s a story about a 17-year-old boy who was arrested with over a million dollars in misappropriated funds hidden in a Costa Rican casino account! Smart kid, but how smart is he really if he got caught? On the site above there are also tips for consumers generally focusing on how not to give your information away to anyone at any time. Check them out.

It worries me a little, this huge amount of illegal activity. I know that a lot of people feel that currently the world is very imbalanced in terms of wealth and spirituality and that this new epidemic is just a karmic reaction of the oppressed masses. The United States earns 50 percent of the world’s economy, of course some of the other 95% of Earth’s population is going to be keen for a piece of the pie, right? Steal from the rich and feed the poor like that guy in the green tights.

The funny thing is I think that a lot of these thieves are living in America and unbeknownst to themselves be already part of the top 5% of wealthy humans. The problem is that they always want more. Money can become addictive in a consumerist society whose advertising and marketing schemes are constantly bombarding us with stimulus relating to the next new product that we ‘need’ in our lives. We are never satisfied with what we’ve got. The next purchase’s momentary injection of adrenalin becomes more of an imperative than any concept of lasting spiritual happiness.

Feel sorry for these people that have to go through all the rigmarole of sorting all these frauds from the real sites out there. I doubt there is a religion on Earth that teaches that theft is a balanced respectful action. I do know that when the country of Australia was founded it was done so on the backs of convicts, many of who had only stolen bread to survive. That’s a kind of theft that will question your moral value system. I’ll leave you with one last question: If the ‘first world’ has nearly all the money on our planet, are we the biggest thieves of all?

Author:
Jesse S. Somer
http://www.m6.net

Jesse S. Somer is a concerned human hoping to one-day witness humanity living in a peaceful and egalitarian world.

Terms:Articles may be reprinted provided content is not edited and links are kept live
Source: www.articledepot.co.uk

Spam is one of the most evil things most people deal with on a daily basis. There are many different techniques for detecting spam. One of the most used and most effective filters is called Bayesian filtering. It uses a statistical method to analyse the content of each mail to determine the probability of them being spam.

Knowledge about the specifics of this method are not needed to use a Bayesian filter. Just install any of the softwares that feature Bayesian filtering and your off. The filter will need training but in most products this is done simply by correcting the filter when it misses. Either by marking spam mails that got through the filter as spam or marking wanted mails as clean. As the filter learns the number of errors will decrease.

The reasoning behind Bayesian filtering is quite simple. All mails contain words. A fundamental assumption in Bayesian filtering is that spam contains words different from those in other mails. We then assign each word a factor. The factor tells us how often the word appears in spam versus other mails. Given a mail we extract a number of words and find the corresponding factors. We then use the collection of factors to calculate a probability. If this probability exceeds a certain limit the mail will be classified as spam.

A common way to initialise the factors is to give the filter something to learn from. You give the filter a number of spam mails and a number of wanted mails. The filter sifts through these mails and sets initial values for the factors for each word. The filter can later be perfected by correcting errors. When wanted mails are classified as spam and we correct the filter, the factors for the words in that mail are decreased. Similarly when a spam gets through the correction means that the corresponding factors are increased.

How spammers try to fool Bayesian filters

One way of fooling a Bayesian filter would be to use lots of words that has had no prior training in the filter. Factors for words are typically in the range of 0% to 99%. Where 0% means that it is highly unlikely that this word features in spam and 99% means that it is highly unlikely that the word features in wanted mails. New words are often given a factor of 50%. If the spammer can hit enough of new words the spam will get through.

It is here that bad spelling comes in. Given the number of spam promoting Viagra most users have gotten most users filters will classify any mail with Viagra in it as spam. But if the spammer instead writes Vlagra or /iägra or Víagrá there is a slim chance that no other spammer have used that combination before. Spellling badlly thuss seeams t0 bee á müst fór spammerrs.

For the Bayesian filter common words that are used in almost all mails will cause problems. Some filters deals with this by implementing an exclude list. Words on that list are always excluded from the calculation.

Does Bayesian filters work?

Yes it does, take SpamPal which is the software I use myself. It features multiple filters where Bayesian is one. The Bayesian filter even learns from when other filter classifies a mail as spam. In the box below is information from a spam I got recently, the Bayesian filter includes this information in the headers of the mail. The mail program then uses this information to remove spam from the inbox.

X-Bayesian-Result: Spam (100)

X-Bayesian-Words: absolutely 97 astounding 99 automatic 48 battery 84 diverse 77 energy 95 feelings 99 forest 99 geocities 40 goods 89 heart 83 identical 99 innocent 99 modules 50 nearly 86 number 76 ones 50 originals 50 outlooks 50 passed 47 poor 50 quartz 99 removal 37 roolexes 50 serial 40 spend 80 star 50 super 62 supply 98 their 75 there 69 through 81 watches 99 where 61 winding 99

The first row is the compound result for the Bayesian calculation. This number (100) shows that this mail is most certainly spam. The next row (or rows when we look at it here) shows what words/factors combinations where used in the calculation. We can see that spelling Rolexes as roolexes got the desired effect, a factor of 50% where used for that word. But the shear number of “almost only in spam” words gave it away. Next we look at a wanted mail.

X-Bayesian-Result: Clean (0)

X-Bayesian-Words: behalf 2 cause 82 company 86 confusion 16 contained 92 contains 81 developers 3 distribute 81 don’t 85 extension 13 feature 14 largest 83 license 15 listed 2 meant 86 membership 85 misleading 99 others 76 professional 84 program 9 purchase 13 shared 99 shareware 4 sites 18 software 22 source 18 submission 0 submitting 0 thank 23 these 77 think 77 update 10 users 9 version 8 windows 77

The first line tells us that this is a wanted mail. The list of words shows us just how well this works. While there are quite a few words that are mostly associated with spam most words have factors well below 50%.

Conclusion

Bayesian filtering works and it works well. When working in parallel with other filtering methods it can filter out most spam from most users inboxes.

This article is about how spammers tracks who actually click on links in spam. An alternative name for this article would be “Never Click on Links in Spam”.

We all know that spam is cheap to send. But spammers know that there actually is a cost involved and they want profit from sending them. Therefore information about who actually reads the spam and clicks on links is worth gold. Even if they don’t stop sending spam to anyone they will prioritize sending to those that are known to receive them. To gather this information there are a few techniques spammers use. The primary techniques are images and links.

Images are an easy way to track who views the mail. Spammers insert images into the spam and name the file with a unique name for each spam sent. When the mail is viewed the mail client loads the image and the spammer can see who actually opened the mail.

Links are used in a similar way but the information gathered by the spammer is even more valuable. Not only does this prove to the spammer that the recipient read the mail but that he or she is actually willing to act upon spam. This is just the kind of people that spammers want to send spam to.

But how can you give each recipient a unique image to download? It’s actually quite simple, you don’t. Instead you give each recipient a unique name for the same image. Independent of what filename you ask for, the web server responds with the same file. This is actually quite easy to do on most web servers. Another way is not having any image. The web server then logs the request as a 404, which means File Not Found. The spammer then analyses the logfile where all the information wanted can be found.

The good news is that some email clients, for example FireFox, by default does not show images. Instead you have to choose to show them, thereby protecting you from image tracking. Not clicking links in spam is, however, still something you need to learn.

Unless you use the Internet only for surfing and never use your email address you’ve probably received something that is called spam.

There are different definitions for spam but I will say that spam is unsolicited email commercial. Many people harvest other people’s email addresses on email and web forums and send them info that they didn’t request. This is very frustrating because you loose your precious time deleting those unwanted messages. In this article I will explain how NOT to appear like a spammer.

Opt-in

If you have an email newsletter it is very important that you don’t appear like a spammer. If you want to stay long in email publishing business your newsletters have to be based on opt-in method. It means that a subscriber chose to receive your newsletter and that you have their permission to send them your newsletter. It is called Permission Marketing. I would suggest
that your list be double opt-in. Now what is double opt-in?

Double opt-in means that your subscribers have to confirm their request to join your list. Confirmation is done by replying to the message that you send to everyone who had initiated subscription. Beside replying, people can confirm their request by clicking on a certain link. This ensures that one person can’t subscribe another person against his or her will. Also, never buy so called opt-in lists and also never sell or rent your members base.

Welcome message

I would suggest you that you ask your new subscribers to save your welcome message. There you can put the necessary info about your list and list management: list description, subscribe/unsubscribe address, digest address, owner’s email address, list rules…

This is important because of the following. Many people promote their newsletter for some time, until they get enough subscribers and then publish the first issue. However, it is most likely that someone who had subscribed to your list several months ago forgot that he or she actually requested to be a member of your list. And then, they can accuse you that you are a
spammer. If they save a welcome message they can see that they required to be your subscribers.

Subject line

Subject line is very important in email newsletters. Beside, From field it is the most important thing for someone to decide whether to open your newsletter or not. I would suggest that your subject line consists a title of your article, issue number and date. If your From or To field doesn’t consist your list name than you should put your list name in Subject line, too. Preferably in brackets. If you have your subscriber’s first name in your database you should definitely put their name as the first thing in the Subject line. Then it is more likely that they will open your newsletter. Never use spam techniques like putting Re: at the
beginning of your Subject line so that people think that they sent you an email and you are sending them your reply. Nobody is fool.

Filtration

Many people use email programs with powerful email filter options. Many people set their filters to delete messages with get-rich-quick-schemes, porn and similar content so it is wise that you don’t put that kind of text in your messages if you want that people read it. Also, don’t capitalize your words like FREE, MAKE MONEY, GUARANTEED… I wouldn’t suggest that you use this or similar words in the first place beacuse these words are often used by spammers.

If you have an option that in To field be your subscriber’s email address and not, for example your list name, that would be ideal because some mail washer programs automatically flag messages which don’t have a recipient email address as possible spam.

List management

Always provide very clear information regarding list management in your newsletter. Very important thing is that your list management provides very easy way of unsubscribing. For example, some email newsletters have at the very bottom an unique unsubscribe address for every subscriber. It can be something like leave-yourlistname-111327893L@yourlistserver.com This way, your subscribers can unsubscribe only with one click and they don’t have to worry if they sent unsubscription request from address which is in your subscriber list. Good list management is, also, useful because you won’t loose your time explaining to your subscribers how to do something, for example unsubscribe or set receiving messages in digest mode.

Also, it is wise that if you use advanced email marketing software like Group Mail to include important information about your subscribers in every issue of your email newsletter. In other words, to personalize your newsletter.

For example, you can make a section at the beginning of your email newsletter where you will write several text lines so that your subscriber see that he or she really chose to be your subscriber. Many email marketing software have an option to include a code in your issue that will be automatically parsed after sending so the subscriber will see his or her info.

Something like this:

____________________

MEMBERS SECTION

Your name: !*COMPLETE_NAME*!
Member since: !*MEMBER_SINCE*!
From IP address: !*IP_ADDRESS*!

_____________________

And in your Editor’s Section you can start your writing with:

Dear, !*COMPLETE_NAME*!…

That’s why personalization is very important.

At the end, you can read several spam messages and - do the opposite in your email newsletter.

Author:

Dejan Bizinger is a Contributing Editor for Infacta. Infacta is email messaging services company providing powerful, yet easy-to-use award-winning software for making professional email campaigns. For more information visit: http://www.infacta.com

Terms: This article may be reprinted provided content is not edited and links are kept live
Source: www.articledepot.co.uk

Do you like spam? No, I’m not kidding. Everybody knows what spam is, almost everybody seems to have learned by heart simple advice like “do not click …” “do not respond…” , “do not buy…” but on March 23, 2005 Mirapoint and the Radicati Group, a consulting and market research firm, released preliminary results of their end-user survey on email hygiene. “This preliminary data is surprising and somewhat shocking to us,” said Marcel Nienhuis, market analyst at the Radicati Group. The survey shows that some end users haven’t learned the lesson and still make the same blunders.

Blunder 1 — clicking on embedded links within spam (not including the unsubscribe link) — 31% of respondents have done it at least once. The most dangerous mistake. Clicking on any embedded links in spam messages helps spammers determine ‘live’ email accounts, which means more spam. What’s worse, users can pick viruses, Trojans or other malicious code–just by clicking on embedded links. It may cause various problems, including loss of confidential information–identity theft, and loss of money from bank accounts as a result.

Users shouldn’t forget about such threat as phishing. Not long ago, on February. 15, 2005, it was the Radicati Group that pointed out –fraud and phishing types of email are one of the fastest growing segments of spam. In the first quarter of 2005 the Radicati Group expects fraudulent emails to reach 8% of all spam.

Blunder 2 — trying to unsubscribe to spam using the ‘unsubscribe’ link in the email — 18% of respondents

Some users are naive enough to think that spammers really won’t send any junk mail to their addresses if they tell them not to. Haven’t they heard that spammers use the unsubscribe link solely to identify active email accounts. When individual email addresses or entire domains are found to be active, they are doomed to flood of spam.

Blunder 3 — What’s more: Over 10% of respondents have purchased products advertised in spam. Sending out huge volumes of spam is very cheap, so let’s face it–spam is an effective means of advertising. Spam is booming, and these 10% users who actually bought anything advertised by spam, are partly to blame for it.

The consequences can be very serious when such a user is at work. Online criminals find more and more ways of stealing valuable information, some of these techniques include spam. Spam filters won’t solve the whole problem; much still depends on end users. Marcel Nienhuis, analyst from the Radicati Group, was absolutely right when said “no technology in the world can protect an organisation if users exercise bad email behaviour.”

Author:
Alexandra Gamanenko currently works at Raytown Corporation, LLC—an independent software developing company. This company provides software capable of disabling information-stealing modules, which can be hidden inside spyware as well as viruses, worms and Trojans. Learn more — visit the company’s website www.anti-keyloggers.com

Terms: Articles may be reprinted provided content is not edited and links are kept live
Source: www.articledepot.co.uk

I do not have an account at Citibank , neither am I an American citizen however I keep getting emails asking me to check my account details at Citibank as they are going through some restructuring. I even received one that said that a check had been returned and that I should check my account online by following a link to make sure all is well.

Another date in question I received one that said that I had won a free DVD player and for me to collect the prize I just had to send my details of address and so on. Wow the internet has spurned a new era of con artists. There are those who are trying their best to get your info especially your credit card number while others use it to control your surfing habits with all these viruses that force your browser software to surf to one URL no matter how hard you try to avoid it. (Porn sites are notorious for that!)

One has to be very careful when one opens his or email these days as more often than not you inbox is flooded with all kinds of filth. Persons get your email address even though you have never surfed to their website. How do they get you email address. Robots that is how, these little programmes surf the net trapping email addresses from webpages, your own mail and forwards. These are stored by companies which sell these lists out for cash. Yes surprising that yourname@coconuttree.com is a hot item. You have no control over it you just have to live with it.

Another trick of the spammers is those “unsubscribe lists” oh these are just another way of you volunteering your email address they do stop sending you one mail and start sending you another. So no more viagra, now they offer you cialis. lol

So what can you do. Block them I say. Just block them out using the tools provided by your email programme, ISP or email service provider. Then get yourself a good spam programme. There are some good ones out there. Also report the abuse especially if come s from a well known domain such as yahoo or google.

Help keep spammers at bay. They must be stopped!

Author:
-Oswyn James is a webdesigner and the owner of a multimedia webdesign firm.

Your message is not being delivered

If you send emails to your customers, I have some bad news for you. Not all of your emails are making it to your intended recipients. Between ISP spam filters, spam-blocking email servers, spam-killing email software, and email content filtering everywhere in between, the chances are high that your messages just aren’t making it past all of these roadblocks.

Recent studies show that opt-in subscriptions are erroneously spam blocked at rates of 17% (according to Return Path) to 38% (according to Mail.com). So, 17% to 38% of the e-mail you send to people who want it or even pay for it in many cases, does not reach them. Just by choosing the wrong words or phrases, or sending the wrong type of attachment, your email can become a “false positive”, and end up filed into some garbage bin where it gets mixed up with various offers to increase the size of some random body part — never again to be seen.

These false positives can occur even if the intended recipient is very interested in receiving your message, even if their life (or livelihood) depends upon receiving that message. Even if automated spam filters don’t destroy your message, as in-boxes fill up with more and more garbage, it’s becoming common for people to simply overlook wanted mail and inadvertently delete it.

It’s only going to get worse.

When the new federal law dubbed “The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003″ (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) was passed in December, many were startled and confused by the apparent legalization of spam. Now, as long as an emailer complies with the law regarding header falsification, misleading titles, and opt-out procedures, it would seem that marketing through spam has become legitimate!

The CAN-SPAM law only restricts the legality and processes involved in sending Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE). There is no implied responsibility on behalf of any provider to guarantee delivery of all messages. In fact, ISPs are given the right to filter and block email any way they deem necessary according to their policies. The law doesn’t burden ISPs to discriminate whether the email was permission-based or unsolicited. They can block incoming bulk email simply on the basis of a single complaint.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, the CAN-SPAM Act suggests a bounty of 20% or more of fines collected go to the people who turn in spammers. As more “offenders” are reported, more ISPs are blacklisted, and the more likely your message will end up vaporized long before it hits home.

So now, with more and more marketing efforts involving purchased and shared opt-in lists, more and more companies able to legally spam, and more and more Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail floating around on the internet, there is bound to be a reaction, and that reaction is sure to be quite strong. Following the Red Queen Principle, as spammers continue to find a means to push out spam — ISPs, hosts, and email packages will continue to improve their defenses, as well, blocking more mail than ever before.

Has E-mail Come to an End?

No one could have imagined that things would get this bad. Spammers and virus authors are rapidly crippling email. Even though e-mail was once dubbed the “killer app” of the Internet, some doomsayers are going so far that viruses, spam, and spam filters are joining forces to bring about the death of email. The theory is that, eventually, inboxes will become so full of unwanted garbage emails, and so many desired messages will be deleted along the way, that email will become useless.

Some e-mail publishers are considering giving up on e-mail altogether and finding other ways to deliver their message. While this may sound pretty extreme, the spam wars are an extreme situation. And extreme situations call for drastic measures…

RSS to the Rescue

One such alternative is RSS, which stands for either Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary, depending upon with whom you’re speaking. A primary reason that RSS is a viable alternative is that since readers select their RSS Feeds, spam is no longer an issue. This is because RSS works a little bit differently than email, using pull, instead of push, technology.

By notifying people interested in your content, as well as web sites that collect and package content announcements (called aggregators), you “feed” them your content. From this process we get the term “RSS feed.” By providing an RSS feed, another site may pick up your “news” through your feed and syndicate it. Only the feed publisher can designate what information gets into the feed, and the only information the subscriber pulls down is what the publisher puts there.

If email continues on its self-destruct course, RSS could very well become the new standard, either replacing email subscriptions or, more likely, as an email supplement.

What are RSS Feeds?

An RSS feed is a Web-accessible XML file containing a listing of web pages with related news or information. RSS is basically a stream of raw data: content completely separated from presentation. The XML-based RSS feed contains content information, such as the headline, description, an excerpt, and the URL where the subscriber can find the content in its entirety. Once uploaded to a website, the RSS feed should be validated for completeness and accuracy. Once it is validated, the feed can then be submitted to engines.

A sample feed can be seen at: http://www.EnvisionSoftware.com/Articles/Index.xml

Consuming the Syndicated RSS Feed

Individual subscribers can view RSS feeds in special feed reader software, called a news reader. Additionally, webmasters can syndicate your news feeds to their website using an aggregator. Both aggregators and news readers consume RSS feeds, presenting them in a format for use by humans in pretty much the same way Web browsers work with web pages.

To subscribe to a newsfeed, the subscriber tells their feed reader to periodically poll a certain site’s RSS feed file, pasting the URL for the RSS feed into their feed reader, much like bookmarking a page in your Web browser.

Then, to read the news, the feed reader visits the subscribed feeds, grabs the latest information, and displays a sorted list of the latest headlines from each source. Sometimes the reader will show brief descriptions of the content, but it always links to the full content on the publisher’s site.

Not quite ready for prime time

Even though it’s been around for a decade, RSS technology is still in its infancy. This immaturity presents a few challenges.

The biggest issue today is that mainstream web and e-mail clients do not yet support RSS feeds. Expect to see some movement in this direction as the RSS movement swells.

There are lots of freestanding news readers out there, and they each have their unique shortcomings. Over the next year or two, RSS software should improve significantly and RSS will become a more robust publishing platform.

RSS usage and news aggregator adoption is still very limited. So, RSS will not be a complete solution without greater subscriber participation.

RSS is text-only. Attractive layout and graphics cannot make up for poor quality content in the world of news feeds.

The RSS Business Model

Content publishers need to determine how to make RSS content distribution profitable. Just as there are paid e-mail newsletters, there can be paid RSS news feeds. It’s just another file that resides on a web server, so it can be served from a password protected web site. However, with a paid RSS newsfeed, readership is reduced, as subscribers are limited to using RSS aggregators or news readers which support authentication.

While content publishers may be afraid of RSS, the business model of e-mail publishing doesn’t really change using RSS. Readers still see the same content, with the same design, layout, and ads in an HTML newsletter. The trick is to have content which strikes the reader’s fancy — headlines and descriptions have to be worthy of clicking on, before the readers will see the full content.

What Does The Future Hold for RSS?

RSS has gained quick acceptance in certain circles such as small technology companies, innovative consulting organizations, and self-publishers. Even Microsoft has started publishing RSS feeds without attempting to strong-arm themselves into a dominant position, thus far.

AOL’s upcoming AOL 10 software will support RSS technology. Microsoft will most likely support RSS in Outlook and Outlook Express, similar to its current support for newsgroups. Additionally, web hosting tools like Geocities offer tools to syndicate RSS feeds.

It may take some time, however, for RSS to gain momentum in the IT departments of midsize-to-large companies, which are typically slower to adopt nascent technologies like RSS.

Should you consider RSS for your publication?

While RSS may not be an immediate replacement for the email newsletter, it will become a powerful choice in corporate and personal communication in the very near future. Once the big guys adopt RSS as a content sharing and distribution medium, it will gain greater acceptance. The benefits of RSS will be widespread, and full-featured RSS news readers will be prevalent.

Moving your subscriber base from e-mail newsletters to RSS feeds might be a tall order at this juncture. For now, it’s up to publishers to sell readers on the RSS concept, and explain how it alleviates the pain of spam.

Whether you decide to convert to RSS full force or simply offer RSS as an alternative for your subscribers, it’s important to realize that e-mail is starting to lose its luster, and now is a very good time to include RSS in your publishing repertoire.

About The Author:
Daiv Russell is a Software Engineering Strategist with Envision Software, a software project management and development outsourcing company committed to helping information technology organizations solve problems, increase revenues, and reduce costs by guiding software development teams through project management chaos. Envision publishes Luminary, a monthly software project management newsletter. DRussell@EnvisionSoftware.com

Chances are if people haven’t requested to receive an email from you then you are wasting time. Let me guess your routine:
-Select a list of names.
-Type in subject and body text
-Click send.

Then your email is sent to as many people as you want, even thousands. So why aren’t they replying or jumping at your offer? Well it could because they consider it spam(meaning they didn’t request it). So probably right now your great offer and email are sitting in a Spam folder, Trash bin or they haven’t checked their email and haven’t gotten a chance to delete it, yet. So basically all of your time and effort as well as your money is also sitting in your trash bin. But why?

It is very simple. Just like the many number of flyers and ads we receive through regular post(which most of them end up in the garbage), people hate to get mail(email or not) that they have not requested. Sure we every so often get a coupon in the mail we love to use but other then that it is just a waste of our time. For the amount of spam that we get takes alot of time to either delete. It also gets frustrating even when we set up our filters that some emails still get through(or good emails get put into our bulk folder). Alot of time even a good email is mass produced to be sent out to hundreds of people and usually doesn’t address us. It is just a template that you use. Which leads us to our next problem with this.

Even more so today you have to protect your pc. When ever I see an email I don’t recognize or something I didn’t sign up for I immediately think “is this spam or is this a virus”. Which then usually leads me to delete it without even reading the offer inside. This is because there are so many people out there sending spam and viruses via email that no matter how good your offer is or how much money I will save. If I open up an email that has a virus, it will probably cost me alot more time, money and headaches to get it fixed then all of the offers out there combined. So it isn’t worth the hassle.

Now with so much spam out there don’t be afraid to address possible clients via email, just make sure you personalize it as much as you can. Just remember this saying. If it looks like spam, acts like spam and I didn’t request it. Then it is probably spam and I will delete it.

Author:
Anthony Jewell has over 6 Years experience in the Web & Graphics World. You can visit my business at http://www.logo2d.com ©Copyright 2005 Logo2D.com