Now that my new book “Managing E-mail”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1405300264/qid%253D1044801476/davidbrakeswe-21 is out I shall be monitoring its sales progress with interest. I looked around for sites that could help me do this and found three – “Jungle Scan”:http://www.junglescan.com/ lets you keep track of your book’s Amazon rank, “GoogleAlert”:http://www.googlealert.com/ emails you at regular intervals to tell you what has changed in a Google search for a given term (like a book title) so you can see newly-indexed pages about your subject (useful for lots of things besides books!). The third service from “Books & Writers”:http://www.booksandwriters.com/ lets you track both Amazon and Barnes and Noble’s sales ranking but the very week I started to use it they announced they are introducing a charge.

I was wondering when this issue would start receiving some attention. A recent survey discovered that on average 17 percent of “permission-based” marketing messages are “erroneously” tagged as spam by ISP spam filters and are therefore never seen by their intended recipients. I would imagine that at least some of that is due to large numbers of people tagging email as spam that comes to them because of dubious definitions of “permission” (where companies have passed on details of their addresses to other “partners” for example). It’s noteable that 46 percent of email from “catalogers” (whoever they are?) is bounced on average compared to less than 1% of non-profit email so I expect some of the email bounced arguably deserved to be.

Nonetheless this is a serious problem and may become more so over time if spam volumes continue to rise and more people start to rely increasingly on technical “fixes”. The problem is, of course, that people who really do want to receive some bulk-delivered email – notifications of special offers they requested, for example, or even political communications – will end up missing it and won’t even know it happened. That’s why I believe carefully-phrased legal solutions to spam will in the end be better solutions to the problem than technical “fixes”.

Some suggest spammers (who are mostly in the US – and apparently mostly in Florida) will simply move overseas to avoid regulation but I believe only a hard core will be willing to live with the disruption to their lives and businesses that moving overseas to a country without anti-spam laws would cause. Anyway it has to be worth at least trying to lessen irresponsible bulk emailing using the law.

Thanks to this Techdirt thread for the heads-up

Here’s a story that makes my teeth grind with frustration – leaked order logs from a spammer selling $50 bottles of penis enlargement pills show around 6,000 people responded to the messages over one month alone. This Wired article goes into detail – some of it eventually tedious but usually grimly fascinating – about the kind of people who do make these purchases. Somehow they even managed to get one of these morons to talk about why – “there was a picture on the top of the page that said, ‘As Seen on TV,’ and I guess that made me think it was legit,” said a San Diego salesman”.

I do worry a bit about the breach of privacy involved in producing the article at all, however…movies japanese lesbianmovie lactatingmovies lesbian pornomovie lesbiansmovie sex lolitamovie adult matrix maturevs movies mature youngmet art moviesmmf movies fuckingmovies mommy

The easiest way to enable people to email you from a web page is to put some HTML code in – mailto:you@youraddress.com. Unfortunately this is also a good way to make sure spammers get ahold of that address. They send automated search spiders around the Internet looking for anything with an @ sign in it and add it to their databases. Follow the directions on the Email Protector page and you can put your address on a web page using a mailto: link but without giving spammers anything they can see.

One minor caveat – people with old web browsers may have trouble accessing your email that way. Also, this trick won’t protect you if you use your address itself as the link text – just use your name or company name as the link people click on. If you want to display your email address so people can type it into their software themselves or write it down, use “GIF TEXT”:http://www.srehttp.org/apps/gif_text/mkgiftxt.htm which will turn your email address into an image file which they will be able to understand but computers can’t.4mandu nokia ringtoneringtones 22free 5c nextel 22 5cp107 samsung all saints ringtonesalan cherrington exposure indecent11123 pickerington oh lane terrypickerington 11123 ln terry ohphotos accrington arialamateur swingers nevada yerington in Map

Months after I finished writing it, a pair of copies of my new book – Dealing with E-mail arrived at my door. The rest of you will have to wait until the end of August to get one but why not order now? It costs just £4.79 from Amazon in the UK ($7 in the US) and is designed to be a simple and practical guide showing not just how to use email software but also how to use it effectively and sensitively within an organization and as a business tool.

I’m hoping that businesses will hand it out alongside other training materials when they do their new employee inductions to discourage new hires from registering their work email addresses on websites that could sell them on to spammers, emailing everyone in the company to tell them about a missing earring and other email crimes.

Sometime in the next few weeks I will be adding a link from my home page to a resource of email related links and further advice about email use which I couldn’t squeeze into the book.

Hope you all like it!loans in 24 lasvegas payday hoursloans down jumbo 0student accord one trust loanloan ks 125broker 125 loan package wholesaleof all types loans autoaloan pronounceda loan aes student makeamortization calculator loan carloan 10 payday

Wired News reports an appeal court ruling in the US that ruled a person forwarding an email containing libellous statements to a mailing list is not themselves guilty of libel. It was suggested that this protection may also extend to webloggers who report stuff that is sent to them.

Of course the truly litigious will simply choose a court jurisdiction that is more favourable to them – the UK for example…

Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.wachovia accept creditcardamex bank cards credit of canadaonline lpn accredited degreeinquiry credit allowedunion education credit amarilloexpress monitoring credit program americantax eligibility new credits 2007high test equivalency accredited school Map

The Centre for Technology and Democracy has tried to determine the things that get you spammed the most. Their report seems to indicate posting your email address up on public websites is the worst thing you can do, but there are lots of other ways spammers can get at you. Also, they found that contrary to popular believe unsubscribing to a spammer’s email does not seem to increase your likelihood of receiving further spam.

There are lots more useful details in the report but if you don’t want to read the whole thing, the BBC offers a quick summary.

(Or at least some of the world). It’s a commonplace notion now, but this article on the OpenDemocracy site about the World Social Forum brought home to me the increasing importance and universality of email – not just in the first world but (at least among the political class) in the developing world as well.

“I realised that the wealth I had accumulated was all there in the stack of cards as thick as a blockbuster novel, which I had collected. All the rest I could lose.

Each of those cards is a thread which now connects me electronically with a person in the Philippines, Senegal, Santiago, Morocco or Budapest, a person with whom I have just eaten or taken a bus, a person whom I may never get to visit, but who carries another network of contacts, nationally or internationally, through NGOs or trade unions, a person who from now on will be my correspondent.”

The author goes on to talk about receiving business cards with email addresses from someone living in a shantytown in Cameroon or Guelmine in the Sahara. Being able to communicate with people from such remote regions is a phenomenon only a few years old, as the digital divide in such areas is slowly bridged…

This page explains how the Japanese can be more expressive with their emoticons because they have many more letters to choose from. Even using standard characters they manage to eke out more meaning. Like:

(-_-) “He gets angry but he doesn’t express his emotion so much outside”

Thanks, boingboing

o(^_-)O (“a punch for encouragement” to Cory at boingboing!)

Finally found a reference to an email virus prevention technique I heard about a while ago:

“Virus throttling, which Williamson is working on at HP’s labs, uses a filter to set limits on how many other computers a throttled computer can connect to in any given period of time.”

More detail is available from HP in this PDF.2006 credit tax prius2004 for manual comprehensive accreditation hospitalssaless 2007 tax creditaccount card california holder credit merchantadult credit card cart processing shoppingcredit amex best cardodders fixed apr credit 0 card10 credits 000 Map