Internet Defense Technologies

I have done this myself and sometimes feel like I am spamming my friends.  It isn’t that many names, but it still feels generic enough that i wonder.

The definition of spam per the Encarta dictionary is “an unsolicited, often commercial, message transmitted through the Internet as a mass mailing to a large number of recipients”.  So did all your friends opt-in to your mailings and want it?

Usually your friends have not, and some of them don’t want your bulk email, I am sure they even joke that you are spamming them.

So, what should you do?

Don’t spam them.

If you have something you want to tell your friends, send them an email, each one, one at a time.  If it is important enough for you to send them an individual email you will and they will appreciate it.

If it is too much work and not worth it to send them each an individual email, it was probably friend spam.

I used to start my days going through all my spam in the morning. It is amazing how much spam is sent over night so as to be right there waiting for you in the morning.

It sort of makes sense that they would do the mass mailings overnight as this is when most computers are taking a break from all that daytime surfing. Then they don’t overload email servers as much.

So, just in case you were wondering why you were getting so much in the morning, that would be my guess (I would love to interview a spammer and find out why they actually do things).

I have seen the question bounce around asking why a spammer would bother to send an email to someone that appears to have only one line of text. Sometimes even just one line of gibberish text.

There are two main reasons that I can think of (of course, since I am not a spammer I don’t really know):

1) They are actually also sending some sort of hidden attachment. Anything malicious has to be actually opened and run by you, clicked on or double clicked. So for the most part you aren’t in any sort of danger.

2) They are just trying to get some legitimate addresses. They are going to just take off the list anything that bounces and assume all the others made it to a legitimate address.

Now there are some email spam filtering systems that will bounce back obvious spam right away so that they think it is just bounces. This may help to keep you off these lists as well as make it so it never arrives in your email box in the first place.

Since this is my blog, I get to know offer our 30 day free trial of our spam solution as we do this.

Been seeing people complain on twitter that the first email they received in 2009 was spam. While I would love to offer each and everyone of those people a trial of our email filtering software (haven’t heard anything from our guys) it is an interesting thing to note.

The “email marketing” and spamming culture in our lives is huge. While there is a big difference between these two things (email marketing versus spamming) to some people, they mean one and the same.

Email is an amazing communication channel that we now use all over the place. It is so fast that we can coordinate virtually anything with counterparts anywhere in the world.

I have several marketing friends, some who are consultants, and I hear them talk about how they are doing email marketing - but not spamming. On a few occasions I have questioned them more thoroughly and have found elements of the way they organizing these email marketing campaigns which could easily get them labeled as spam EVERY TIME.

My new year’s resolution for 2009 is to work out how to broadly “Clean Up the Net”. Hope to announce more on this shortly.

Would also love to hear what the first email you received in 2009 was.