|
|
| www.1001TopWords.com |
|
|
20 Words That Kill - At Least When It Comes to Spam Filters
Spam, spam, spam. It's terrible not only for those of us on the receiving end, but for those of us who SEND e-mail. This deluge of irritating junk has unfortunately interfered with legitimate e-zine publishers, because we're caught in the anti-spam crossfire. If you publish any type of e-mail publication, there's a likely chance that your e-zine is NOT reaching a portion of your readers. Why? Their Internet service provider (ISP) or e-mail program uses a spam filter. These software programs search for words and phrases that are typical of spam and assign each incoming e-mail a "score." If your e-mail has too many of these words and phrases, you receive a high score, and you may be blocked. TOP 20 "KILLER" WORDS/PHRASES YOU MAY BE USING While there are other words that will cost you more "points" than these do (e.g. sexual phrases), here are the most common "trigger" words and phrases that you may be using in your e-zine: WHAT'S A PUBLISHER TO DO? You have two choices when it comes to beating the filters. One is to avoid using these words and phrases altogether. I've found that hard to do. For example, in a recent issue, I discussed how to use your e-zine to increase business. Unfortunately the word "increase" cost me a fat 1.4 points in SpamAssassin, one of the most popular filter programs. Your second choice is to disguise these words and phrases in clever ways by inserting keyboard symbols within them and/or replacing a letter in them with a symbol. The trick is not to make it too cryptic - you want your readers to be able to understand what you're saying. For example, in my e-zine, I use "fr*ee" for free. While some spam filters pick up on this trick and penalize you for doing it by adding onto your score, I've found that the points this tactic costs you penalize you much less than using the words and phrases themselves. It's not a perfect solution, but it's working for now. TEST BEFORE YOU SEND It's a great idea to test how YOUR e-zine stacks up before you send it out. The good news is you can do this for FREE. Lyris' Content Checker (http://www.lyris.com/contentchecker) tells you how your e-zine ranks in Spam Assassin. All you do is copy your e-zine text and paste it into the box on their site. They'll run your free report and e-mail a copy to you. It usually arrives within minutes. The report will tell you exactly which words are costing you points. Usually you should only be concerned if your score is over 5 points. If so, you can either delete those words or disguise them, as I mentioned above. I test each issue of my e-zines in Content Checker before I publish them, and often I'm surprised (and relieved) that my score is low. That makes me a happy publisher. : ) (c) 1999-2002 Alexandria K. Brown ABOUT THE AUTHOR Alexandria K. Brown, "The E-zine Queen," is author of the award-winning manual, "Boost Business With Your Own E-zine." To learn more about her book and sign up for more FREE tips like these, visit her site at http://EzineQueenTutorial.com/
|
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
Avoiding the Spam Trap: Get Your Message Delivered! Your message is not being delivered. Block Spam with An Easy Behavioral Change E-mails now have a connection back to their servers. I willleave the technical aspects out of this article. Instead, Iwill walk you through how information from your computer isgetting back to them. FTC Botches Fight on SPAM, Microsoft Takes Over the Battle While the Federal Trade Commission is busy fighting over definitions of "What is SPAM;" Microsoft and Bill Gates are taking it to the enemy. Today Microsoft announced another case and legal action, which is being taken against a spammer who is in Germany. Microsoft did not announce the name of the company it has filed suit against but it is based in North Rhine-Westphalia. Spam - Its Whats For Breakfast The first thing I do every morning when I wake up is head for my computer. It holds the secrets to my day. I read my e-mails from several accounts, check my schedule on my Outlook calendar and even find out how much money I can spend that day from my bank's Web site. I'd be lost without my computer. Internet Tip of the Week: Outsourcing It's no secret that the US economy has slowed down, and many jobs have been outsourced overseas. Thousands of companies are still and are being forced to cut costs, decrease benefits, and even lay off employees. Many of those who lost their jobs, wil l try their hand at doing business on the Internet. How Spammers Fool Whitelists - And How to Stop Them Effectively stopping spam over the long-term requires much more than blocking individual IP addresses and creating rules based on keywords that spammers typically use. The increasing sophistication of spam tools coupled with the increasing number of spammers in the wild has created a hyper-evolution in the variety and volume of spam. The old ways of blocking the bad guys just don't work anymore. Bayesian Spam Filters Explained In a word Bayesian spam filters are "intelligent". Bayesian spam filters are intelligent in so far as they're capable of comparing two sets of information and acting on the result. This is in direct contrast to the vast majority of other spam filters who use pre-built rules to decide which e-mail is spam and which is not. Protecting Yourself With A Porn Filter The harmful affects of pornography use and addiction are well documented by science. As with most things in life, prevention is the most effective way to avoid ever having a problem with pornography. Invasion of the Email Snatchers They're sneaky. And stealthy. They're quiet and mostly unobtrusive, but once you've been visited by them, you'll know it. Because you'll be inundated with a seemingly never-ending stream of spam-mails. What To Do When You Get Spam When you go to your mailbox and find pieces of junk mail mixed in with important correspondence, you throw it out. It is a mild nuisance and you probably don't even give it a second thought. Unfortunately, most people do the same when spam arrives in their inbox. They just delete it. Having a Bad e MALE Day? Email, Spam, Spam and More Spam You just sat at your desk, opened your email account and what do you get? First there is some anonymous donkey from an anonymous and anything but respectable mortgage lender telling you that they can arrange your finance at 3% and all you need to do now that your application is approved is to sign along the dotted line and get in touch with them. This is despite the fact that you have never heard of them or even approached them ? ever!. Sick Of Wading Through Spam? It's a nightmare isn't it? You fire up your email system first thing on Monday morning to be greeted with hundreds of new messages. SPAM: A Nutrious Food or a Waste of Time? Unless the filters on your computer are really good, you're getting at least an occasional SPAM message in your email Inbox. For most of us, we spend more time sorting through and deleting the SPAM than we care to. In fact, my husband told me tonight that of 30 messages he receives each day on our home computer 29 of them are SPAM. Internet Tip of the Week: Cease and Desist While we all admit that unsolicited commercial email is a real pain, I sometimes wonder if the anti-spam zealots are going too far. Last week I was in Costa Rica, and the only practical way to communicate home was by email. I maintain an AOL account just for that purpose when traveling, and was amazed to find out when I got home, that I only received about half of the email which was sent - some of which was important. Dealing With SPAM - An E-mail Address Strategy With SPAM being such a problem it might seem the right thing to do is never give anyone your email address. As a strategy that's not bad but it misses one rather important point; the purpose of having an email address is to be able to exchange emails, both with friends and also as a means to receive eZines from online forums and information sites. In theory any one of these sources could share your email address with a spammer (perhaps by listing it on a public site) and before you know it your email box is full of emails you don't want and can't stop... note, we do not do this, your address is safe with us.Therefore what you need would seem to be a list of separate email addresses, all of which are yours, that you allocate out to the different email lists and online forums you have. That way if one of the addresses gets picked up by the spammers you can just drop and block that one address (and perhaps the list it was subscribed to) and continue in your low or no-SPAM world.So how do we do this?What we're going to do is use one "real" email account (ideally with a hard to guess name) and then a set of forwarded email addresses, all of which are different, but all point back to the real email address. Typically your ISP (Internet Service Provider) provides a small number of email-boxes for you (normally called "POP3" mailboxes). Choose one of these to be your "real" email address and point your email client to it (follow the instruction in your email client such as Outlook Express and ISP to do this). Then we need to register a domain name which will allow us to have lots of forwarded email addresses. 123-Reg.com are an example of a company that provides an inexpensive high-quality service to do this, so we'll use them as an example. Create an account, it's free to do this, and give them your real email address. Then you should register a domain name with them; obviously you need to think of a domain name which you would like as part of your "public face." Choosing a name you like can take a little thought, but don't take too long, domain names are being registered at the rate of one every two seconds, so get in to secure yours as soon as you can! The cost is very low, with .uk domains at around UKŁ3 / US$5 per year and .com/.net around UKŁ9 / US$15 per year (note, you should register for at least two years). Using the email forwarding option from the 123-reg.com control panel, set the catch-all address as your real email address. Then any emails sent to any name at your domain will be forwarded on to you automatically.Here's a worked example for Brenda Wyatt.Brenda's ISP supplied POP3 email address is brenda@myisp.comShe creates an account at 123-reg.com and registers the domain "WyattMail.net"She sets up email forwarding via the 123-reg control panel to forward all emails received to @wyattmail.net to brenda@myisp.com.Now when Brenda signs up to a forum or email list she gives an email address which is individual to that list. Let's say she registers with Amazon, she could register as 'Amazon@wyattemail.net'. They will send emails to that address which will be forwarded to her brenda@myisp.com email address and she can read them as she wishes.The nice thing about this system is that Brenda hasn't had to go anywhere else to register the email address 'Amazon@wyattemail.net', 123-reg just sees the wyattemail.net part and sends it on for her.So what happens if she finds one of her email addresses is being targeted by spammers? Let's assume this happens to her "dodgylist@wyattemail.net" email address. She then goes to 123-reg.com, logs in and goes to the control panel. She selects the email forwarding page, adds a fresh line with 'dodgylist@wyattemail.net' in it, clicks the 'return to sender' checkbox and clicks 'update'. Now any email to this address will be returned to whence it came. Nice, eh?©2005 Paul Quirk & Mark Quirk. Article taken fromCareOfWindowsXP.com. Stuffing the Spammers! I'm really, truly fed up with spam. Every day when the spam arrives and Norton Security moves it into the Norton Anti-spam folder of my Outlook email client, I wonder how anyone can be so incredibly stupid as to waste their time sending me such garbage. E-mail SPAM: Whats The Big Deal? It absolutely amazes me how many people over-react to receiving e-mail SPAM. Learn Simple Strategies That Will Stop Spammers From Bombarding Your Inbox! Spam filter is the solution that most people resort when they try to steam the flood of junk mails and spam. How Spammers Fool Rule-based and Signature-Based Spam Filters Effectively stopping spam over the long-term requires much more than blocking individual IP addresses and creating rules based on keywords that spammers typically use. The increasing sophistication of spam tools coupled with the increasing number of spammers in the wild has created a hyper-evolution in the variety and volume of spam. The old ways of blocking the bad guys just don't work anymore. Get Your News Releases Through the Spam Filters in 11 Easy Steps In today's spam-filled email world, it's sometimes VERY difficult to get your news releases and PR pitches to the media person you are trying to reach. These tips hold true for personal emails, too, so even if you don't do P.R., this article offers some important email tips.
|
| © Athifea Distribution LLC - 2013 |
