Internet Defense Technologies

Every year or two, Ferris Research updates its estimates for the total cost of spam, earlier this year they did the 2009 estimates .

Their estimates: "Worldwide, spam will cost us all $130 billion; in the U.S. alone, $42 billion. That’s a 30% increase over our 2007 estimates, which themselves were a 100% increase over our 2005 figures."

They further explain the breakdown of where this is costing money:

• User productivity cost (deleting spam, looking for false positives, etc.): 85%
• Help desk cost (IT helping end users deal with spam): 10%
• Spam control software/hardware/service (licensing fees, amortized capital costs, etc.): 5%

Well with Total Mail Defense making it so you have don’t have to delete spam or look for false positives that reduces that amount by 85%.

I am feeling pretty good about our assistance in helping the economy by reducing the money wasted.

Firstly you do not need to install yet another piece of Software on your computers, and if you have a company of any size this can for sure be cumbersome, even if it is a server side push install to the whole base.

Spam and AV Software is known to slow windows systems down drastically, which is another good reason to migrate these things to a service where you can.  The less software you have on a windows system that needs to use the windows registry the better off that system will be.  Also, another great reason to move to a service is you can increase bandwidth on your LAN (Local Area Network).  The reason for this is obvious, resources are not being hung up by too much Spam.

The SAAS Market is new and exciting, from my viewpoint its the best thing to happen to the whole industry.  Take away system resource hogs and put them somewhere else, and managed by others that are professionals in their own area.

This saves TIME AND MONEY for any company, and in this Economy, we need to do just that.

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)

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.

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:

I get asked often how someone can not be marked as spam when trying to market.

There are two main things you have to do:

1) Only email people who actually want your information. The best way is to get people to sign up for your list with a double opt-in (they have to check a box that says yes and then you send them an email they can respond to in order to be on the list).

Part of this is then DO NOT sell or give their email address to anyone or use it for anything else but what they signed up for.

2) Get these people to add your email address to their “whitelist”. You are going to have to walk most people through this step as many people won’t know how. But if you can get them to do this, they will get every email you send them.

Final note is if anyone ever asks to be off the list, IMMEDIATELY do so and don’t send them even one more email.

I was doing a search on Yahoo today and found the below:





In case you can’t read it, it says at the top:
“1 potentially harmful website is marked on this page”

Then under the link to the actual listing (and before the description text) it says:
“Warning: Unsolicited Emails”

I hate it when any system is abused by using our compassion for our fellow man to make a buck.

During times of disaster the spammers have been known to take advantage of our desire to help each other by phishing us and getting our information.

Because of the recent earthquakes in China, there are scams running to “donate” money to help these people and the only thing you will be doing is making someone else rich.

Please don’t get scammed, but please do whatever you can to help. If you can donate money, go straight to a site and donate.

More information here:
US-CERT (United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team) warning
Federal Trade Commission’s Charity Checklist

Seems there are some changes to the CAN-SPAM act recently, all approved by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

Below is the quote straight from the FTC website, but the most interesting part to me is #1. Effectively saying that all emails must allow you to unsubscribe in one of two ways:

a) Send a reply with remove request
b) One click to a single page to opt-out

This means you can’t send me on a wild goose chase through you site for the opt-out link. This means you can’t ask me for anymore information than my email address to “confirm” my opt-out.

Just wish the illegal guys could somehow be forced to do this. Unfortunately what I have seen as true for most laws, only law abiding people pay any attention.

Quote from FTC:

“The new rule provisions address four topics:
(1) an e-mail recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her e-mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply e-mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page to opt out of receiving future e-mail from a sender;
(2) the definition of “sender” was modified to make it easier to determine which of multiple parties advertising in a single e-mail message is responsible for complying with the Act’s opt-out requirements;
(3) a “sender” of commercial e-mail can include an accurately-registered post office box or private mailbox established under United States Postal Service regulations to satisfy the Act’s requirement that a commercial e-mail display a “valid physical postal address”; and
(4) a definition of the term “person” was added to clarify that CAN-SPAM’s obligations are not limited to natural persons.”

FTC article on new CAN-SPAM rules

In case you missed it, Zango is sueing anti-spyware company Kaspersky Lab alleging that the company interfered with Zango’s business relationships with consumers by removing Zango adware from people’s computers.

Now people get Kaspersky product specifically for the purpose of removing adware and spyware, which serves consumers pop-up ads based on their Web-surfing activity.

If Zango were to win this suit (I don’t think they have a change, but I am not a lawyer) what does this mean for companies who specifically serve people by blocking content that is most likely harmful to them.

Being in the email spam business, I will tell you, there is no way to be 100% perfect at it, we can get pretty darn close, but not 100% perfect 100% of the time.

I am scared of the ramifications of this and hope the courts realize that it is the job of Zango to make a product that doesn’t alert the programs to possible bad behaviour.

While companies that detect and block spam, spyware, adware and more work hard to get it right (we will lose customers otherwise) both sides need to work together, not sue each other.

Original Article on Mediapost