Internet Defense Technologies

There are so many problems with service based internet issues today it’s a wonder anyone still emails! From Spam, to Malware, to Viruses, Phishing attempts and on and on it is a barrage of funk.

Imagine walking down the street and people yelling at you to buy this or try that or whatever other random comments real life Spam would consist of. Or if you went into a department store to buy something and no one was there to charge you for your purchases. I’d walk out and never go back!

As was recently announced Google’s Postini was shut down preventing many people from getting emails for hours and some for days.

Service support, per Tweets was nil. Which only adds to the irritation because if there is anything worse than having problems with internet and mail it is having problems with trying to resolve those problems!

There are REAL solutions to Spam and the host of other internet related filth out there!

Total Mail Defense (TMD) – not to be confused with Total Male Enhancement – is one of those providers!

I have had great success, uninterrupted, by using this service. There is no “Spam folder” to have to deal with, it is set up for real people who have real lives that don’t need extra work created by a “solution”.

It seems like a ridiculous question.

I didn’t know it was Spam.

It looked legitimate.

I thought it was from my aunt Gertrude.

I needed to lose weight and it looked promising.

The endless list goes on and on, but the truth is marketing. You were a recipient of well planned marketing. No matter what you think the reason you responded to the Spam was the reality is you were “hooked”!

The subject line or that is was from someone who looked familiar, whatever it was you took hold of the line. That is what marketing does. Good. Bad. Legal. Illegal. All the same, it hooks you.

Would you open the front door of your house to someone who maybe looked like someone you know? NO!

If you start looking at your email as a real life communication channel, like your front door, you would think twice and stay away from the curiosity that is often just bait for bigger troubles!

Our CTO and founder, Ron Edison, recently wrote an article for Business Solutions Magazine called Philosophies of Spam Solutions.  It is now being featured on their website and I wanted to give you an excerpt here:

While spam by the billions reaches out to users around the globe, they are scanned, blocked, deleted, sorted, filtered, rejected, quarantined, moved, dropped, replied to, and bounced by a panorama of spam solutions and email systems as varied as they are many. Accompanying the ubiquity of spam is a mixed bag of strategies and applications to deal with it.

And, while users rail at spam, they typically complain far louder about “false positives” (legitimate messages treated, blocked, etc., incorrectly by spam filtering systems) — and for good reason. If there’s anything worse than getting drowned in spam, many users agree, it is missing “that all important message”, which at least seemingly is often subject to collateral damage as servers wage their constant battle with spam. Here there is opportunity for an effective solution as long as it can deliver accuracy.

While spam and its effects have been the topic of endless discourse, rarely mentioned in much detail is the underlying philosophy or even exact goal of one solution or another. Certainly, one could say that — of course — the goal is to block all spam and deliver all “ham” (the colloquial for “legitimate email”), but there is more to this than meets the eye.

Enter “reputation.” (read more)

Reports are floating around that Verizon has sent out a “notice” to all of its customers.  The notice sets up a sort of backwards “opt-in” mechanism for sharing your private data.

It isn’ really an “opt-in” rather it’s a “negative opt-in”.  A negative opt-in is when you have to tell someone not to add you to the list and if you don’t tell them not to, you are agreeing to let them (and in this case Verizon) share your personal data.

Even, if like most people, you didn’t read the fine print and didn’t even realize that you were opting in to begin with, and had no idea that opting out was a possibility. Customers who get their bills online instead of in the mail don’t even get the notice.

Information Verizon may share includes what services you have purchased, your billing, technical, and location information. Information can be shared with “affiliates, agents and parent companies.” That’s not very reassuring. “Affiliate” in particular is a very fuzzy term, and usually means any marketer who has signed up with a program and paid a fee.

So, most likely you are about to get spammed by Verizon’s affiliates if you haven’t already.

Every ISP (Internet Service Provider) has their own rules and procedures.

The industry standard is generally thought to be that ISPs will block a sender IP address (an Internet Protocol address, which is a numerical identification that is assigned to devices participating in a computer network utilizing the protocol for communication between its computer) if it gets 1 complaint out of about 1,000 emails sent.

So, if you are getting spam, definitely report it.

Unfortunately serious spammers (of the viagra and fake watch variety) don’t send from one constant IP address. They vary it often and make it otherwise very hard to spot them, so reporting may not stop it.

The people who do use a constant IP address are generally from a real company and either don’t know better or thought they were some how above it (they did have a box you checked which said they could spam, I mean email you).

For those who are sending these emails.  Make sure people want what you are sending and you are sending what you said you would.  If you are using an old list, some of your subscribers may have forgotten about you or their email addresses may no longer be valid. There are even some subscribers who just use the complaint (”mark as spam”) button when they want to get off of a list because it is more convenient than the unsubscribe link.

So, put the unsubscribe link at the top and the bottom so that people will do that before they hit the report spam buton.

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.

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.

Most people who send emails don’t really understand all the pieces and ways you can send an email.

You can send an email “To:” someone or “CC:” someone or even “BCC:” them.

CC is a hold over of terminology from the good old days when you had to use a piece of carbon copy to make a duplicate of something (before copiers were widespread).

So when you CC someone you are making a copy for them to read.

BCC means a blind carbon copy, you know when you gave some data to a co-worker but sent a copy of the communication to your boss so he would know where that person got it from.

When sending an email you should utilize all of these different fields.

The biggest mistake I have seen done on this is when someone tries to forward an email to a large number of their address book and they put everyone in the “To:” or “CC:” fields.

I have spoken of this before most recently in my post Forwarding Warning or Alarming Emails, but the fact holds true even when sending one of those cute emails to your friends to make them laugh.

When you put everyone in the “To:” or the “CC:” then everyone gets to see everyone’s email address. Now maybe you feel your friends wouldn’t abuse the messages, but if they ever get hacked and someone else looks for all the addresses they know, you have just exposed all your friends.

So be sure to use your email fields correctly, to protect your friends.

Over the weekend I got forwarded an email from a friend about a “BIG VIRUS COMING” and tried to use another website to prove that the virus was real (http://www.snopes.com/ which is a Urban Legends Reference Site to validate things or not).

My friend did two things wrong when forwarding this email.

1) She forwarded it to almost her entire address book, and put all these email address in the “To” line. Which means I can see all of these people and their email address and these other people see it to. Anyone can now email all these people.

I don’t know who these people are and don’t know that I want all of them to have my email address, but the choice has been taken away from me (if just one of these people is a spammer, I have just been signed up for another piece).

If you are going to forward an email to your address book, put all the names in the “BCC” field. BCC stands for Blind Cabon Copy, which means everyone is blind to the address it is sent to. People will still get the email, but they won’t be able to see any of the email addresses.

2) My friend claims she read the Snopes page to verify this, but she obviously only scanned it, because she missed at the bottom where it says:

“Readers should take particular care not to confuse the real postcard/greeting card virus with a number of virus-related hoaxes that have been circulating for several years. A variety of messages forwarded by well-intended people to warn others about the Postcard virus contribute to this confusion by including within them links to our article about the “Virtual Card for You” hoax”.

If you are going to forward an alarming email (or any news for the matter) make sure you have 100% verified it is real, don’t scan and do half a job on this. Some people don’t take alarming news well and they get upset, especially if they don’t know what to do about it.

It seems that whenever you buy something on the Internet this leads to more email spam in your mailbox.

However, a lot of legitimate companies are starting to recognize that selling your email address to someone or even spamming them themselves without your consent gets them in trouble.

However instead of being very overt and forthcoming about getting your consent they are being subtle and many people miss the opportunity to say no because it is so hidden.

Whenever you buy something on-line read the entirety of all the pages of the checkout process. Especially look for a little title checkbox that is you either have to check to not be on their mailing list or uncheck. Sometimes there is more than one: