How to Turn Your SPAM Into Cash

Spam can really be a good thing. I know most of you are thinking to yourself that I'm crazy, but I'm not. I have built a huge warm market and many affiliates from the information you are about to read. Spam can be good or bad it just depends on how you look at it.

Truth be told, spam just doesn't work if you're trying to build a home business. You might get a few new affiliates or sales from spam, but then you get busted and your hosting service cancels your account and you have to pickup shop, get another host, setup your bulk mailer and start all over again. This cost time and money which some spammers chalk up to "cost of business" but ultimately it's just not worth it.

Now knowing this simple fact is what makes your spam so valuable. Of all the spam emails that you receive there are plenty of potential clients; however there are more useless leads. The key is finding the diamonds in the rough, the people who really are trying to build an online business but obviously don't know how. The emails to ignore are the vast majorities which are selling Viagra, Cialis, penis enlargement drugs and other similar products and services. I would also steer clear of any spam with pornographic content or you could get yourself on multiple spam lists which send nothing but pornographic material.

Now that you have found a few potential clients you need to really take a look at what they are offering. Don't just send them an email advertising your affiliate program or product, because then you would be spamming. Take a look at what they are offering and really critique it. Look at the positives and negative aspects of their business and ask them questions. Ask them how they are doing, ask them what techniques they are using to advertise and network. Ask them about their business and compensation plan. Put all of these questions into an email and explain how you received their email and checked out their website and now would like a little more information. It is important that the email subject have the name of their business in it so they will likely open and read it.

Then you listen and honestly try to help them, this technique is not an advertising campaign it is a way of building long term business contacts. Who knows, their product or company might be something you need, or maybe you can synergize and work together so you can both benefit. The key is not to advertise to them, you must restrain and build the relationship first. You must give them something, weather it is help, guidance, free e-books or marketing tools that you have picked up, whatever it is just be sure to show them that you want to help.

Going back to my statement before, where I stated that spam is not profitable. This tells us that most of these people are willing to listen to other ideas and techniques that do work, and that's where you come in. You should also be thinking about a back end product that can really benefit them, not just something you can sell to them and make the most commission on, I mean something that can truly help them. For instance you could offer them an alternative to spam, maybe teach them how to build an opt-in email list which is much more profitable in the long term than spam. Help them install an autoresponder or refer them to a good autoresponder company. Then maybe you can mention that you are an affiliate of a list building company where they can purchase some real leads. Or you can teach them about search engine optimization and give them some free information about linking, blogging and article syndication. Then let them know you are an affiliate of an article syndication automation website.

Do you get my point, get involved with their business and educate them on effective marketing strategies and feed them a back end product down the road. This is a very effective method of networking, if you can restrain from advertising to them and just give them information when they need it.

Using this method on a continual basis can produce a great list of contacts that respect and listen to you, which of course will eventually lead to sales and duplication.

About The Author:
Adam Beazley - The Web Marketeer http://www.Plug-In-Home-Business.com Did you found these tips & Strategies usefull? Get More! Sign up for my Newsletter Now! http://www.plug-in-home-business.com/PIHB.html
Posted: 22-09-2006
Article Source: ArticlesBase.com

What You Need to Know: CAN-SPAM Laws

Anyone doing business online and using email for marketing needs to know about the CAN-SPAM laws.

Smart online marketers use "permission" marketing: you invite potential customers to join your email list, and offer a newsletter, a special report, or a sequential series of messages to form an e-course. The recipient "opts-in" to the list by replying to an invitation and subscribing. By "opting in", your subscriber is telling you it's OK to send email. They've given you permission and your email messages are not considered spam.

But most people don't really understand what constitutes spam. If you're in business for any length of time on the Internet, you may encounter false accusations of spam simply because people forget they opted in receive your message. To many people spam is simply an unwanted message.

This can cause problems for you with your email service provider. You must be able to prove that you haven't been sending unsolicited email. Your proof lies with the list management system you use that tracks invitations and opt in responses.

Here's what you need to know about the law is so you can rest assured that you aren't breaking it.

CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) establishes requirements for those who send commercial email, spells out penalties for spammers and companies whose products are advertised in spam if they violate the law, and gives consumers the right to ask emailers to stop spamming them.

Simply put, here's a rundown of the law's main provisions:

It bans false or misleading header information. Your email's "From," "To," and routing information must be accurate and identify the person who initiated the email.

It prohibits deceptive subject lines. The subject line cannot mislead the recipient about the contents or subject matter of the message. Subject and content must match.

It requires that your email give recipients an opt-out method. You must provide a return email address or an automated way for your subscriber to opt out. You must honor the requests.
When you receive an opt-out request, the law gives you 10 business days to stop sending email to the requestor's email address.

It requires that commercial email be identified as an advertisement and include the sender's valid physical postal address. Your message must contain clear and conspicuous notice that the message is an advertisement or solicitation and that the recipient can opt out of receiving more commercial email from you. It also must include your valid physical postal address.

One of the best and most efficient systems with a minimum of complaints is the ecommerce system, www.KickStartCart.com . They automatically include CAN-SPAM compliant features when they send out email broadcasts. Furthermore, if you import a list of email addresses into the system each recipient will be required to confirm they want to be on your list. All potential recipients must respond to a confirmation email in order to be included in an email list. This is called closed loop or double opt-in and is further assurance against people using the system to spam or send unsolicited messages.

While the respectable business community strives to be compliant, the spammers find new ways of circumventing the laws and jamming up email inboxes with junk. Unfortunately spam filters never do a reliable job of keeping the spam out and are more likely than not to keep legitimate email from being delivered.

The best assurance against spam complaints is to use a reliable system such as KickStartCart, and to send out valuable relevant content to your subscribers. The ratio of information to promotional messages should be in the neighborhood of 80-20 or 75-25.

As a serious business person using the Internet and email, it's important you comply with the laws so you can avoid getting in hot water with your service provider and keep your subscribers happy.

About The Author:
Denise Wakeman & Patsi Krakoff
For more leading edge Internet Marketing tips go to http://www.biztipsblog.com. You can also subscribe to The Blog Squad's ezine Savvy eBiz Tips at http://www.savvyebiztips.com. To learn more about using social media tools like blogs, go to http://www.buildabetterblog.com. Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff are Internet Marketing experts and are known as The Blog Squad.
Published 09/27/2006
Article Source: http://www.EzinePlug.com

Protect Your Users’ Privacy. Fight Spam.

On all the websites where users interact with each other, the email addresses have to be displayed. But this causes big troubles, due to the Spy Bots, who parse the websites and try to find email addresses. When they find an email address, this is added to a database, which will be soon sold to many companies that need potential customers. Then, in a few days, you will start receiving a lot of "super-offers", most of them being just damn scams, filling your inbox and making you waste a lot of time distinguishing useful emails from the spam-emails.

This is the reason why many people become members of sites using a "spam account", and I mean an email account that is used just for subscribing, and not a real and official email account. But what if you need to register on a site and you are forced to use an official email, something like support@yourdomain.com ? Should you register, though you know that soon your inbox will be full of useless Spam messages? Here comes the decision of webmasters, who may or may not try to protect their users' emails.

Many of the webmasters don't care about the consequences of showing their users' email addresses. But this can determine people not to register, as absolutely nobody wants to receive tones of Spam. On the other side, if the webmasters make efforts to protect their users' email addresses, the latter ones will surely be happy. And we all know that a happy user is a returning user!

That's why I recommend that all webmasters and site owners fight Spam and protect their users' privacy. There are 2 aspects that need to be considered: the text displayed and the link itself.

The HTML code of an email would look like: username@domain.com

To better understand the explanations, I will notate:

- mailto:username@domain.com as String1
- username@domain.com as String2.

Spy Bots try to find email addresses in both String1 and String2, so it would be best to encode them both.

The best way to hide String1 is to use JavaScript. For String2, a simple replacement between "@" and "." (dot) with other characters would be enough.
username [AT] domain [DOT] com

Because normally the user's email is taken from a table in a database, I will now show you how to quickly implement this anti-Spam solution. I will use PHP, one of the most used scripting languages nowadays. We assume that $support is the variable that contains the email address.

============================================
// we will now encode String2, replacing "@" and "."
$sup_text=str_replace("@"," [AT] ",$support);
$sup_text =str_replace("."," [DOT] ",$sup_text);

// we will now get the username from String1
$i=strpos($support,"@");
$sup_user=substr($support,0,$i);

// we will now get the domain name from String1
$sup_ext=""; $i=strlen($support);
while($support[$i]!=".") { $sup_ext = $support[$i].$sup_ext; $i--; }

// we will now get the domain suffix from String1
$sup_domain=""; $i--;
while($support[$i]!="@") { $sup_domain = $support[$i].$sup_domain; $i--; }

// we will now encode String1
$sup_hidden="$sup_text";

echo "Support: $sup_hidden";
============================================

Using this method, the users' emails are displayed, but it is much harder for the Spam Bots to find them. Of course, the people behind the Spam Bots can adapt the Spy Bots Engines, but parsing the pages would be much more difficult. If you also combine the solution I described with some random text replacements (in String2), you will have an anti-Spam shield that will make the email-hunters go away from your website.

Webmasters, web freelancers, forum administrators, do not hesitate! Use this method and gain your users' trust and respect. Protect their privacy and make them feel sure that their registering to your site won't make them receive hundreds of useless Spam emails.

About the Author:
Ted Peterson writes for several websites like CoreDownload http://www.coredownload.com and Adolix http://www.adolix.com. You are welcome to visit them to read more articles.
Article Source: www.iSnare.com

Identifying Spam When it Arrives

Most of us have opened our email program and found, alongside correspondence from people that we know, offers for products from commercial web sites. Some of these emails we expect. We have asked to be notified of sales and other opportunities or joined a mailing list offered by the company. Many times, however, the offers are from companies that we have never done business with and may have never even heard of. This is Spam, unsolicited bulk email, and can quickly lead to a massive overload of your inbox. thee are people that have reported receiving upward of 200-1000 pieces of spam per day.

Identifying Spam as soon as it occurs is the first step to preventing it from happening again. Once your email address is in circulation with these companies, you are well on your way to a very nasty problem. Advertising from legitimate companies is one form. The rest are for illegal services, pornographic material, questionable products, and fraudulent schemes. It is invasive and many times illegal. Spam is the worst form of junk mail and a typical reason why many people have to change their email addresses.

In best cases, the clue can be found in the subject line. If you are offered quick money or a chance to find your long lost high school classmate, you can probably guess that it is Spam. You may be amazed that, as you read your email, that these companies claim a right to send you this email because you have a relationship with one of their "partners" or "affiliates". All that this may mean is that they bought your email address from another company with dubious privacy policies. It is still Spam.

Spammers will try to trick you. Unfortunately for us, Spammers only need a response rate, by some estimates, of 0.0001% in order to be profitable. This means that they will use practically any measure to get you to open it before hitting the delete button. You may receive an email from Grandma or one asking for help in the subject line. Before you know it, you are reading their advertisement, if only out of curiosity. These spammers can be trickey.

Check the dates and times on any email that you are unsure of. These companies know that many email programs will sort the inbox by the earliest mail sent. As a result, they place false send dates and times on their Spam hoping that you will open them first.

The worst has to be the ones that seem to come from companies that you know and trust. They may claim to be from your internet service provider in the subject line or have a similar address to that company's name. It may look like it is from the accounts payable department of a major law firm. Spammers count on your curiosity and hope that you will respond. Even if you don't buy anything, they now know that your email address is connected to a live person and, if nothing else, can sell that address to someone else.

Read the To and From fields in any questionable email that you receive. If the To field is empty or filled with an anonymous address, then you have Spam. An anonymous address is typically something like freeoffer@happydays.com. An address from someone that you do not know through an account at hotmail, yahoo, or msn is probably Spam. These are anonymous, easy to get accounts that spammers use and then discard when they are done. By the time the Service Provider has been made aware that spam is originating from these accounts, the spammer is gone. Scrambled, random addresses (X12YT853@yahoo.com) from accounts like these are definitely not to be trusted regardless of the content.

Finally, if the email contains a story in which you are asked to do anything to help anyone, check the story out online. There are several great websites like truthorfiction.com that will help you sort through any potential scams or hoaxes perpetuated through email. These stories can range from silly pranks to dangerous fraud schemes and may need to be reported to the proper authorities before someone, like you, finds their bank account drained.

About The Author:
Keith Londrie II is a successful Webmaster and publisher of spam-resources.info A website that specializes in providing tips to help eliminate and avoid spam. Getting rid of spam that you can research on the internet in your pajamas from the comfort of your own home. Visit how to combat spam Today!
Article Source: http://www.articles2k.com

Spam Sources: How To Avoid Them

Too tired of deleting “junk mails” in your email box? Junk emails and spam are becoming a great and aggravating problem in the World Wide Web or the Internet. Some people may become so awfully annoyed with the dozens and tons of unsolicited commercial emails or spam that they are forced to change email addresses from time to time.

Spam are those mails flooding your email box with several copies of the same message. So it is like a chain letter where the source needs to send the letters, with the same message, that is, to a certain number of people to get his or her much-desired wish. Spamming is actually a scheme being used by several spam sources to impose their message to individuals who would not opt to receive it given the choice. Who are the usual spam sources? These are probably, but not limited to business-related infomercials, often for fraudulent products, and those scheming get-rich-quick ideas, or other sham services. There is no likely cost for sending spam; the cost actually is not shouldered by the spam sources but usually the recipient or the carriers of the spam.

You may wonder where on earth do these spam sources get your email address?

Researches on spam sources found out that email addresses posted on websites or in newsgroups most attracts spammers. Spammers or spam sources use a software program that can gather and record all email addresses listed on websites and all who posts to public newsgroups.

At present there is no easy way to prevent spam or junk mails. But there are some tips to avoid being tracked by spam sources.

Your first defense against spam sources, change or disguise email addresses posted in a public electronic place. It is rather ideal not to sign out any online member directories. This is like giving them your go signal to distribute your email address to spam sources.

The numbers of spam sources are ballooning everyday. So be extra conscientious when you encounter online forms that requires you to disclose your email address. In particular, pay attention to any options discussing how the address will be used. Be cautious when ticking boxes which could allow them to send you emails or share your e-mail address others.

Have several email addresses for specific purposes. This perhaps may be the best way to avoid spam sources. Instead of using a single email address in all your all transactions, use disposable email addresses which may allow you to immediately cancel the address if spam sources were able to track it. Take note that many web sites offer free email accounts and this gives you the freedom to designed one-time use of emails.

Finally, to cut down the numbers of spam sources, use spam sources filters. With the mushrooming of web hosts offering free email services, these also come in handy with a reliable spam sources filtering. Although they may not totally guard you against spam sources, but surely they can get rid of several spammers and spam sources tremendously.

About The Author:
Andrew Symonds
Need to know more about Spam Sources
Article Submitted On: October 05, 2006
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

The Death of Internet E-Mail

Since Internet communications has started aoong with it came the quickest and cheapest way of communication on a worldwide standard and that is internet e-mail. Email or Electronic mail was intended to be a personal tool of communication.

Since internet marketers now and the so-called opt-in newsletters and ezines came into view, since then internet email was bombarded with offers, sales, discounted offers, etc. which we now known as spam.

Huge internet-based companies like Yahoo(tm), Microsoft(tm) and Google (tm) devised a way to limit and if possible stop spam (uncolicited commercial email) thus leading to the creation of spam filters or spam busters. Spam filters are not a.i. (artificially intelligent) yet to sort out emails in a way that it will recognize people that you want to talk or communicate with. But it works in a rather "dumb" way of isolating spam from the real email you want to receive. So they worked on a series of words, so called internet marketers or so called newsletters that are always accustomed in saying in a newsletter. They are the filtered or ranked out words such as free, money, $, cash, opportunity, business, ads, credit card, pay, sale, freebies, and many more. In other words, the more frequent you use these words in an email makes or triggers the spam filters to isolate your email either as spam or not. So the next time you give your relative a freebie, don't mention the word "free" many times or your email message will end up in a trash or much worst gets banned in the email server for scheduled deletion. And the poor relative never received your freebie.

So instead of using email, people considered forum, blogs, rss, websites, i.m. (Instant Messaging), and the latest is desktop alert clients to get their messages across.

People will always think of ways to communicate without being blocked. So also are the site owners who want to communicate with their site members.

I hope this article will help you to communicate better with your relatives using the internet. If you want to get more articles and resources, you can get them via desktop alert client. Those are small program usually half a megabyte that can easily reside on your system tray unobtrusibly and will only popup when a new message or new article has been added. Any category you want I hope I have already made as a desktop alert, if not try to contact me via my site: http://www.nabaza.com/contactus.htm or via ICQ: 18747939 or go directly and get your share of your free desktop alert located at http://www.nabaza.biz where all desktop alerts are made easy.

About the Author:
William Nabaza of www.Nabaza.com specializes in domains, webhosting, webmaster's tools, netpreneur's articles and resources. Stands out as a freebie provider, business opportunity provider and the like. Visit his site at www.nabaza.com or contact him directly at william@nabaza.com
Content Provider: http://www.my-articles.com

Email marketing spam content checker

Emailcenter offer a free email marketing spam content checker that scores your email against spam filter rules.

The checker looks at the following characteristics in your email marketing campaign:

* Content and phrases used in the email * HTML tags and styles used * Header information such as 'From' address and subject line

Upon running the check you will be presented with a score and a list of reasons why the score was generated. If you score under 3 your email should cope fine against most spam filters, between 3 and 5 is problematic while anything over 5 is almost certainly going to get trapped as spam.

Maxemail users can access a spam checker from the Maxemail interface. Alternatively anyone else involved in email marketing can register for access to the free spam content checker here

What are the key spam characteristics the tool highlights?

Phrases If your email is loaded with spammy phrases such 'Free' or 'Offers' the tool will highlight these for you. Some industries such as finance will see more issues here than most due to their standard terms for their products being the same as words used by spammers who offer loans and financing.

HTML errors Filters don't look too kindly on email marketing messages with invalid HTML code. This might be incorrectly defined colours such as #FFF instead of #FFFFFF.

Junk code and images It is important to minimize the amount of HTML tags that you use. Filters look at the ratio of text copy to images and HTML tags. Too many images or tags suggest that it could be spam.

Blacklists The filter looks at the major IP blacklists to see if the server that sent the email marketing campaign is on any of these blacklists. This often gives a particularly high score that would cause the email to be junked.

From address As many spammers use a false address to send email from this is flagged as high importance by the filter. Indeed examples of where it may be picked up as spam would be if the address has lots of numbers in.

Subject line Any spam phrases included in the subject line tend to have a much higher importance than if they were simply in the body text.

Unsubscribe text Even if you are being a good permission marketer and providing an opt-out link this can actually give you a higher spam score than if you do not have an opt-out option. This is no excuse not to include an opt-out link though - simply experiment with how you phrase the opt-out statement to overcome the filters rules.

Missing headers and MIME parts A badly formed email will generally get rejected by the filter. This would include missing dates in the headers or incorrectly formatted MIME boundaries.

About The Author:
Rebecca Coe
Email Marketing
Submitted: 2006-10-24
Article Source: GoArticles

How To Prevent Comment Spam With Google’s No Follow Attribute

Putting up and maintaining a weblog of your own could be done for free or built into your paid domain site. Either way, whatever you put up on your blog becomes accessible to practically anyone on the World Wide Web. Your blog has the potential to gain many regular followers and once-in-a-while visitors, given that you deliver content that is relevant and interesting, making it an excellent medium for advertisement or promoting products, services, or other websites relevant to its general area of discussion. Thus, it is a reason for companies paying blog owners to publish their ads on their blog sites.

What happens, though, if a certain company or enterprising individual tries to get onto your blog through the comments page with an active link to their site? That's what's called comment spam, and a business enterprise can be the least of your worries when it comes to this underhanded way of getting Google search ranks up. Enterprising entities do this not merely to promote the site to those who access that particular comments page, but more importantly to increase their ranking in search pages to that the site will stay on top of the search return page.

Another version of comment spamming involves a website owner who only copies the content of his or her site from a different website that ranks high on the Google search page. That way, this dishonest site owner doesn't have to work as hard, to promote the site and gain a considerable following. The good news is that, finding out if one's site content has been copied, has become very easy, as copy detection programs can be found online. Now, let's go back to the links problem.

Fortunately for blogs and sites that allow trackbacks and comments from others, Google has announced their development of a way to decrease the occurrence of comment spam. It's a feature known as the "nofollow" attribute, which allows site owners to add an additional attribute in the form rel="follow" to any href code active link. This added part of a href link commands Google spiders to disregard a link that leads outside of the host site. The objective of this new development is to keep those who abuse open Internet sites from reaping the benefits of their misdeed.

While distressed blog owners may rejoice at this good news, some may opt to weigh the pros and cons of this new feature. To a business owner, a positive implication of using the no follow attribute is that, he or she will be able to avoid freeloaders trying to ride on his own site's Google ranking. Google's new tag can offer you an increased control on the effect of a link posted in your site by someone else without your prior permission. This has the potential to increase the possibility of that someone moving on to trying other possibilities that will increase traffic for their website. When issuing comment spam loses its benefit, then the spammer can hopefully try other things that are potentially laden with honesty, for a change.

Also, the new development will help strengthen the notion that bloggers and site moderators must make an effort to ensure that links that lead to their site will not disappoint, and their content are beneficial to the users of that particular site hosting the link. In addition, site owners must try to focus on outstanding and read-worthy content that will have enough impact to the online community that other sites will want to provide a link to their site by their own choice.

Perhaps the only Internet users who will find this new attribute disadvantageous are those who have become accustomed to using comment spam as a means to promote their own site. However, it should instead be a challenge for them in putting up worthwhile content for their site, such that Internet users will be searching for their site by name, and not clicking on its link by accident. For best results, have the service add the nofollow attribute to links that other users themselves created, such as those within their comment, and the link attached to the name of user who wrote the comment. Other areas where the attribute can be used include visitor statistic sections, guestbooks, and referrer lists.

Among the first weblog software creators that signed up for this service are LiveJournal, Blogger, Wordpress, Flickr, and MSN Spaces. Users of these blog services and others need not do anything themselves. The free blog host only needs to keep the attribute version updated to ensure its full effect.

This concept of having better control over outgoing links isn't all new, however. Forward-thinking programmers have been able to devise ways to prevent search engine spiders from detecting outgoing links for quite a while. Yet this new Google tag gives power to the common website owner over his or her site's outgoing links.
Some may have doubts on the effectiveness of this new service. One notion is that this will not be fully efficient unless it becomes a default option for bloggers and webmasters. Perhaps it also does not help that there are skeptics, not to mention dishonest users that will try to get past this obstacle and even devise a tougher-to-beat approach to comment spamming and link campaigns.

In addition, those who do gain in search engine ranking through referral links by those who really, wholeheartedly support their site have the most to lose. The possibility of search page rankings being a thing of the past presents itself in this scenario. Then again, it would not hurt to pose a challenge to those whose sites and products have yet to gain popularity. Perhaps businesses need to make a habit of improving, and have faith that those Internet users, who know exactly what they are looking for on the web, will find them eventually and be satisfied with what they have to offer. Besides, the really great ideas are the one that stand the test of time.

About The Author:
Danny Wirken
http://www.theinternetone.net
Posted: 31-10-2006
Article Source: ArticlesBase.com

Use A Spam Filtering Tool To Manage Spam And Save Hours Everyday

For most of us, changing our primary email address to get rid of spam is not really an option. This is because our email addresses are known and used by many of our contacts and may also be printed on business cards and other material. We certainly don't move to a different residence because of some junk mail in our letter boxes. Luckily, there are some very effective ways to combat spam and one such was is using a Spam filtering tool.

The particular tool that I am referring to is called MailWasher. It is a tool that I cannot do without. I've been using it for about 2 years now and my running totals shows that 72% of emails received are automatically deleted by Mailwasher. For more product information on Mailwasher, please visit: www.BSDRegister.com/products/mailwasher

Mailwasher is a piece of software that works at the source i.e. it connects directly to your inbox on the server and takes care of emails there. This is very different to using email filters in your email software for example Outlook or Thunderbird. The major difference is that Mailwasher wipes out emails on the email server so that you never have to download them. Having a filter in Outlook would mean that the email has to first be downloaded onto your computer and then examined and dealt with accordingly. For those messages spreading viruses, this could well pose a threat.

Mailwasher is easy to setup and takes a few minutes. There is a 30-day free trial of the software so that you can have ample time to decide if it is working for you. Initially, I started setting up my own spam filters and was having some success, but then I stumbled upon a link on the company's website that pointed to a link where an avid user was offering his filters for free. I downloaded those and installed them and have never look back. The amount of spam that was identified started to steadily increase until the 72% level that it is at today. This means that on average, 3 of every 10 eamils I receive are legitimate and are allowed through by Mailwasher. The rest are deleted at the source and I don't have to spend time downloading them. This is a big deal if you are using dialup access to the Internet.

There are many controls within the software. You can specify emails be deleted automatically without your knowledge or you could have the program mark them for deletion but let you glance at them just in case. This is useful initially until you get a good feel for it. There are many other options that fall in between these. The good thing is that they are all on one screen.

There is a concept of a blacklist and a whitelist. You can import all of your address book from Outlook with a couple of clicks and from other email programs as well. These go into what is called a whitelist. Mailwasher will allow all emails through that are on the whitelist. It will mark or automatically delete all those that are on the blacklist. Adding or removing someone from either list is a very simple point and click exercise.

Mailwasher also allows the setting up of legitimate filters. These are methods of specifying an email as legitimate. For example, if you identify all emails coming from your company domain name as being legitimate, then all messages from your coworkers will be allowed through without you having to specify each person. This is achieved using a wildcard setting such as "*@youworkdomain.com". This can also be used to blacklist an entire domain such that all messages are immediately marked for deletion or automatically deleted depending on your settings.

MailWasher is an independent program and does not interfere with your email software. It sits in the system tray and does its work diligently. In my case, it checks my inbox every 10 minutes and does a cleanout. I have my email software setup to only retrieve messages when I instruct it to so that MailWasher has the most opportunity to do it's work.

Mailwasher also has more advanced controls, one of them being something known as "Origin of Spam". There are servers on the internet which list known spam addresses. When you receive a message from one of these addresses, it is automatically marked as spam and deleted without your filters even being invoked. This is a remarkable system and comes free with MailWasher. A whopping 14% of emails that I get are identified in this manner and automatically deleted.

MailWasher is an indispensable tool in my email arsenal. If spam is a problem for you, it could do likewise for you. Download your free trial today and use it for 30 days. If you like it, you only pay $37 which in my book is a small price to pay for so much time saved everyday.

About the Author:
Balraj Dhaliwal is an Internet Consultant for BSD Register, a well respected and liked domain and hosting provider because of its no nonsense simple approach to getting things done. Visit BSD Register at http://www.BSDRegister.com
Article Source: www.iSnare.com

Handling The Web Spamming Disease

Perhaps one of the overall discomforts that most people have to deal with today is web spamming. People who have their own blogs and sites that contain guestbooks or allow visitors to place their own comments with regards to the site content or topics being discussed. It is quite easy to spot web spamming. For one, they are in no way related or saying anything about the website content and its overall essence. Comments such as purely placing information that would want to inform other visitors on certain websites or available information on the web is a clear case of web spamming. A lot of these can be seen in blog sites, especially the ones that do not use strict moderation of the comments that are placed beforehand.

There are two common types of comment spam generation techniques, manual and automatic generation. The first one does not really need deeper evaluation since as it connotes, they are manually inputted by visitors to any website or blog site that they come across and would resort to copy and paste the pertinent information in them while using alias names or names closer or related to the information that they are spamming. The second one, the automatic comment generation spamming, automated tools scour the web looking for comment like or guest book forms that allow anyone to automatically post bogus content on them. A lot of these have been going around and web spamming has become uncontrollable today. While blog sites have developed the option of comment moderation to fight off these web spamming practices, this provides an additional load for the blogger or webmaster who maintains the site. However, more load or not, the safety from maintaining the site and retaining its essence and the people who are inclined to properly place comments that are related to the theme of the site is more important above anything else.

As with all spamming efforts, this type of spamming is not that different from the main purpose of the others. Either to create mischief or promote sites that is yearning for attention to be able to earn profits through hits and visitors. Such is the main concern of most sites today, the race towards the most number of hits to be able to establish their sites and make them more visible and searchable in the web. For the, web spamming may seem to be a good way to achieve this, but considering that it is at the expense of innocent sites that are simply up for their own rational reasons, web spamming is really something that is disheartening and despised by people.

Other webmasters resort to testing their scripting techniques to answer the challenges made by web spamming. Programming for websites are done in various ways, and while each type of methodology may have their own special way of tackling this web spamming conflict, there is no doubt that unique ways of handling this problem will altogether provide headaches to the misdemeanors of web spammers over the web. This is why people take various courses in programming, to be ready for such challenges posed by mischievous web spammers present today.

About The Author:
Judge Paul
Want to know more about Handling The Web Spamming Disease
Article Submitted On: October 11, 2006
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

Securing Your Email In An Insecure World

Computers have simplified millions of people's lives. With the advent of online technology we can be more productive in the office, organize household matters, and communicate with others around the globe. Do you ever think it's all too good to be true? Well, you'd be smart to question the overall ease and efficiency of the web. The sad truth is, along with these perks there are a few major pitfalls. And if you aren't aware of them now, you may be in for a rude awakening.

So many people get excited about the wide-reaching possibilities of an email system. Indeed, it is staggering to think about how you can connect with someone on the other side of the world with just a click of a button. Unfortunately, however, sometimes by clicking the mouse you are doing more than reaching out to a faraway friend. You may also be inviting email viruses and scams into your mailbox.

What is spam anyway?

Email spam is also called unsolicited bulk email - like junk mail in your computer system. In other words, it is email that you have not asked to receive. When we say "bulk email," we are usually referring to one message that is sent to more than 200 email recipients at a time.

How is spam targeted?

Basically, if you participate in any newsgroups, forums, or post your email address on a personal or professional website, you can be targeted for spam. A spam mailing list will be created by combing electronic newsgroups and mailing lists, or by conducting a broad address search online via "spambots" that roam the net collecting email addresses.

What is phishing?

Phishing is a relatively new form of email scam and it's a serious one. What it refers to is an email that claims to be from a legit corporation (like Citibank, PayPal, eBay etc.), but it is really a spoof. Phishing can be tough to spot because it can look pretty slick. The email will come with a return address, a logo or a brand that seems on the up-and-up, links to other sites etc. But whoever is behind the scam is trying to get your financial info and rip off your identity. Studies show that 5% of the people who receive these fake emails respond to the "phisher."

Now that you know what these terms mean, how can you avoid dealing with them?

Clearly, the answer is with an expert email security system. No doubt, new scams will be popping up before you know it. We haven't even discussed the horrors of email "worms" and "viruses."

What can be done?

-Use a web host with a secure email system that will control spam, maintain your privacy, and protect you from email viruses. A good web host believes that all individuals have the right to send and receive secure emails around the clock.

-The first step is to monitor the spam that comes into your email mailbox and then report any scams to the Anti-Spam League or the Anti-Phishing Working Group.

-Be wary of any emails that ask you for your personal information, especially financial details. Do not give out your credit card or bank account info unless you are on a secure server.

-Be wary of email attachments. When in doubt, don't open them!

-Make a point of checking your account balances online to see if there are any sudden withdrawals that you did not authorize.

-Use anti-virus software and be sure to update it regularly (such as Microsoft patches).

-Think about installing a web browser tool bar that will alert you if a known spammer or phisher is trying to reach you (such as Earthlink ScamBlocker or eBay's tool bar).

About the Author:
Madison Lockwood is a customer relations associate, specializing in small business development, for Apollo Hosting. Apollo Hosting provides website hosting, ecommerce hosting, vps hosting, and web design services to a wide range of customers.
Content Provider: http://www.my-articles.com

Manual search engine submission Vs Automated search engine Submission

Manual search engine submission is the best, effective and preferred method when it comes to submitting your website in the search engines. Search engines expect every details of the site to be filled in manually through their website mechanism. Automated submission through back door is considered as a SPAM in most of the popular search engines and directories.

There are hundreds of general and niche search engines which are eager to accept your website if you submit the required information in the right category according to the submission guidelines. The question is how you are going to do the search engine submissions and which search engines are you going to submit in? Certainly you don�t want to submit your mortgage site in a "health directory” or place it in the sports category of a general web directory.

You may have come across

”Completely automated search engine submission service that submits your site to 90,000 search engines on a click of mouse ... IN SECONDS!"

and lot of other software’s which claim to automatically submit your website to thousands of search engines and directories. The rates of these submissions are very cheap and so is the result of these submissions. Chances are your website will be blacklisted by some of the popular search engines and directories. Consider the facts before you utilize a software or service to do automatic search engine submission.

Every search engine and directory is unique and the have various features which differ in

Different categories and sections. (Some may have as less as 12 main categories while others have more than 3000 categories classified into sub categories and inner categories. The category names are not consistent across the directories)
Different types of form input. Some search engines will ask for a very few details of your website whereas a dedicated account is needed in others for submitting your website. You need to do a detailed registration by providing phone numbers, address etc.
Registration and confirmation methods. Most of the search engines and directories need a confirmation from your email to avoid automatic submission.
CAPTCHA (IMAGE Confirmation) A picture with numbers which have to be manually entered. This is also to avoid automated submission.

Approval of your website.

Maximum number of submissions per user (some of them restrict to a single submission per user)
Frequency of submission..

The popular search engines and directories are opposed to automated submissions and it is considered as a SPAM. No automated software or service can take into account the above different features of search engines and directories while submitting the web sites. The fact is most of the directories do a manual review on the submissions and will find out the automated submissions sooner or later and block them.

What is manual search engine submission and how is it better than automated search engine submission?

Manual search engine submission is the process of analyzing where and what to submit in the search engines and directories by experts and doing each and every submission by hand ensuring a good acceptance rate for your website.

Manual search engine submission involves

Analyzing your website, doing the submission text with title, description, key words and creating a unique account.
Collecting the appropriate search engine and directories for submission and submit the website in the right category.
Modify the submission text as per the need of various search engines and directories.
Confirming the submissions (Image confirmation, email confirmations) wherever needed and co coordinating with the editors of search engines and directories whenever required.
The advantage over automated search engine submission is.

First and foremost, manual search engine submission is the only acceptable method of submission to a search engine or directory. Automated article submission is considered as SPAM which is obvious from the various confirmations implemented by them.
A directory is organized into categories and subcategories. Editors review each submission manually and evaluate the submission. In manual search engine submission the websites are submitted in the related directory, search engine under the right category which is not possible in the case of automated submission. Automated software can't adequately submit to any article directory because it cannot study the directory’s structure and decide which category is best suited.

Websites are submitted according to the different input systems of various directories by manual submission. Whereas automated submission just posts a set of predefined data irrespective of the input fields which results in an incomplete submission followed by rejection.

No search engine or directory is skipped in manual submission. Any Image confirmation (CAPCHA code) and email confirmation is done immediately which is not possible with automated software. Incase for any reason the search engine, directory is down or the website submission is not through, then it will be done another time.

More emphasis on niche search engines, directory related to your website theme.
Very high acceptance compared to an automated search engine submission.

About The Author:
Lazar Stalin works for Submitinme and you can know more about manual submission at
http://www.submitinme.com/why-searchengine-submission.asp
http://www.submitinme.com/manual-searchengine-submission.asp
http://www.submitinme.com/why-submitinme_SE.asp
seo
Published 07/28/2006
Article Source: http://www.EzinePlug.com

How To Choose Anti-Spam Filter?

The damage spam brings you is huge: loss of time, bandwidth and money, risk to delete a legitimate message together with junk emails. So, an anti-spam filter is not a whim but a necessity for almost all PC users who actively use email.

What criteria should you follow to choose the right spam filtering program? What capabilities must an anti-spam tool have to filter and cut off spam mail in most effective way?

Here are the main features a good anti-spam software must have to block spam effectively:

1) it should be a standalone spam filtering tool, which checks all incoming emails on the server, detects and deletes spam messages.

2) deletion of spam without receiving it in your inbox. This way you won't download all the superfluous kilobytes into your inbox and you won't see annoying spam mail.

3) powerful antispam filters built in one program that analyze the message from "outside" and "inside": message header, message body, and message source. Flexible whitelist and blacklist easy to edit and update are also very useful as they help save much time when filtering emails. Good anti-spam software must also have the Bayesian filter in its arsenal of spam filtering tools.

4) easy and safe method to preview emails marked as spam. Inherent in antispam technology is the fact that there will be false positives and false negatives, i.e., email can be flagged as spam even though it is not actually spam and vice versa.

5) flexible spam filtering. Spam emails should be moved to a separate folder. A good spam filtering software should provide the ability to recover an email if it was accidentally marked as spam and trashed.

Simply put, an anti-spam program must be a standalone, easy-to-use software supplied with powerful anti-spam filters able to be adjusted by every user for his personal needs. Now with all that said above you can choose the right anti-spam software among all spam filtering programs available on the Internet.

About The Author:
Julia Gulevich
Author is a technical expert associated with development of computer software like Anti-Spam Software. More information can be found at Anti Spam Filter Resources
Submitted: 2006-10-19
Article Source: GoArticles

Join The Fight Against Spam

This article which you are about to read has been written because of a growing concern amongst all email users of the rise in spam emails which threatens to overwhelm us.

How prevalent is Spam? According to Scott McAdams, OMA Public Affairs and Communications Department, studies show unsolicited or junk e-mail, known as spam, accounts for roughly half of all email messages received. Although once regarded as little more than a nuisance, the prevalence of spam has increased to the point where many users have begun to express a general lack of confidence in the effectiveness of email transmissions, and increased concern over the spread of computer viruses via unsolicited messages.

In 2003, President Bush signed the Can Spam bill, in December of 2003, which is the first national standards around bulk unsolicited commercial email. The bill, approved by the Senate by a vote of 97 to 0, prohibits senders of unsolicited commercial email from using false return addresses to disguise their identity (spoofing) and the use of dictionaries to generate such mailers. In addition, it prohibits the use of misleading subject lines and requires that emails include an opt out mechanism. The legislation also prohibits senders from harvesting addresses off Web sites. Violations constitute a misdemeanor crime subject to up to one year in jail.

One major point that needs to be discussed about this: spam is now coming from other countries in ever greater numbers. These emails are harder to fight, because they come from outside our countrys laws and regulations. Because the Internet opens borders and thinks globally, these laws are fine and good, but do not stop the problem.
So what do you do about this? Her are the top 5 Rules to do to protect yourself from spam.

Number 1: Do what you can to avoid having your email address out on the net.
There are products called spam spiders that search the Internet for email addresses to send email to. If you are interested, do a search on spam spider and you will be amazed at what you get back. Interestingly, there is a site, WebPoison.org, which is an open source project geared to fight Internet spambots and spam spiders, by giving them bogus HTML web pages, which contain bogus email addresses.

A couple of suggestions for you: a) use form emails, which can hide addresses or also b) use addresses like sales@company.com instead of your full address to help battle the problem. c) There are also programs that encode your email, like jsGuard, which encodes your email address on web pages so that spam spiders find it difficult or impossible to read your email address.

Number 2: Get spam blocking software. There are many programs out there for this. (go to www.cloudmark.com or www.mailwasher.net for example). You may also buy a professional version. Whatever you do, get the software. It will save you time. The software is not foolproof, but they really do help. You usually have to do some manual set up to block certain types of email.

Number 3: Use the multiple email address approach.
There are a lot of free email addresses to be had. If you must subscribe to newsletters, then have a back up email address. It would be like giving your cell phone number to your best friends and the business number to everyone else.

Number 4: Attachments from people you dont know are BAD, BAD, BAD.
A common problem with spam is that they have attachments and attachments can have viruses. Corporations often have filters that dont let such things pass to you. Personal email is far more open country for spamers. General rule of thumb: if you do not know who is sending you something, DO NOT OPEN THE ATTACHMENT. Secondly, look for services that offer filtering. Firewall vendors offer this type of service as well.

Number 5: Email services now have bulk mail baskets. If what you use currently does not support this, think about moving to a new vendor. The concept is simple. If you know someone, they can send you emails. If you dont know them, put them in the bulk email pile and then choose to allow them into your circle. Spam Blocking software has this concept as well, but having extra layers seems critical these days, so it is worth looking into.

Let me finish by saying that I do hope you found this article helpful and informative. There is a lot of information out there on this subject, in your local bookstore, your library, my Blog, details which follow, and indeed the internet, so please spend some time on research, you will be well rewarded for your efforts.

About The Author:
John Savage has a Blog which is all about keeping safe and secure on the internet. Click Here to visit.
Posted: 20-09-2006
Article Source: ArticlesBase.com

Understanding How Spammers Work Can Save You Time And Reduce The Spam You Get

Nobody likes receiving spam and having to spend time dealing with it. Even with sophisticated filtering and avoidance mechanisms discussed in my previous articles entitled "Use A Spam Filtering Tool To Manage Spam And Save Hours Everyday" and "7 Steps To Effectively Take Control Of Your Inbox And Reduce Spam", these unwanted spam messages keep on appearing. By understanding how the system works, we can effectively take steps to significantly reduce the amount of spam that we receive daily.

What we have to understand is that email marketing is by far the most effective way to promote products and services on the internet today. The basis of this system it to collect as many email addresses as you can and repeatedly send email messages out to them. There is a legitimate way to do this and then there is the way spammers do it.

The legitimate way is to collect email addresses only from people who volunteer it to you on a website in return for some information that you offer. In addition to this every email sent out must include a link or instructions on how to unsubscribe. I would take it one step further and say that unsubscription must be instantaneous. Having to wait for a few days is unacceptable with the software tools available today. Following this method, you will only receive email messages that you have opted-in for and as soon as you are not getting any value out of it, you unsubscribe.

The spammers mode of operation is to collect email addresses by any and all means available. This could be by building software spiders to crawl websites 24 hours day looking for email addresses on any page. Usually they search for the HTML tag "mailto:" but as users have stopped hyperlinking in response, the spiders are getting more sophisticated and are putting together text like "john dot smith at domain dot com" into the proper valid email address "john.smith@domain.com". Some websites list all their employees contact emails on one page and is a prime target for spam. Harvesting guestbooks where emails are displayed is also a very common practice.

Other methods are more malicious and involve virus-like or worm software being installed on your computer and feeding the names in the address book back to a spam server that collects them.

Spammers trade email addresses for money. This is why the system is out of hand - it is an income producing activity. Every email address has a value to it and no matter how little the value, putting together a list of 100,000 can provide a neat income for a spammer. Most spammers have spam lists many times larger than this.

Spammers also include the unsubscribe link at the bottom of spam emails. These links when clicked and actioned, tells the spammers that this email address actually got through to a live person and that email address is now moved onto a much higher value list and is traded for more money. Those of us who have actioned these links have found the flood of spam coming in to vastly increase within only days.

So now to the question of how to use this knowledge to reduce the spam you get?

First, understand that everytime you give out your email address to a website, that it can potentally be sold and traded. Therefore, if you are unsure about it, use an email address that is not your primary one. Webmail services like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail are perfect for this. You only get the messages when you want them and log into those services. I've used a Yahoo Mail address for this for years now. Everytime I log in there are more than a thousand messages but the one that I want to look at is at the top. I never have to delete these messages, Yahoo takes care of it automatically. The only requirement is that I log in to the service within a set period usually 90 or 120 days to keep the account active.

Once you are comfortable that the site concerned is legitimate, you can then change your email address to your primary one. On the other hand, if you start getting spammed, then you do nothing, let the spam emails build up and get deleted automatically by the system.

In my article entitled "7 Steps To Effectively Take Control Of Your Inbox And Reduce Spam" I discuss an elegant way to safely give out email addresses and shut them down in case they get spammed. This is by far the most effective method that I have used.

Other things to watch out for?

Spammers are facing tougher times and they are finding it harder to get new email addresses. While this is a good sign that means the general public are getting more educated, it does mean that we have to be careful of where our email addresses are shown or advertised. For example, magazines and newspapers often are great places for a spammer to collect email addresses. This is a much slower method but if we think about it, these email addresses are of much higher value because somebody has paid money to advertise and so it is bound to be a real address. This means that we have to think laterally in order to stay ahead of the spam game.

Last but not least, we can surely help significantly reduce the problem by not responding to any spam email message whether it is by clicking on a link, replying to the email or unsubscribing using a supplied link. If you really must look at the site, just type in the domain name part of it into your browser and leave out everything after the domain name. This will take you to the site without the spammers tracking identification code.

Together we can surely put a dent in this system by understanding it and staying one or a few steps ahead of spammers.

About the Author:
Balraj Dhaliwal is an Internet Consultant for BSD Domain Registry, a well respected and liked domain and hosting provider because of its no nonsense simple approach to getting things done. Visit BSD Register at http://www.BSDRegister.com
Article Source: www.iSnare.com

Why most anti-spam systems don’t work and how to get an effective anti-spam solution

The problem of spam has been getting worse. In recent years spam has been an annoying nuisance such as advertising. During 2006 there has been a considerable worsening of the problem with an enormous increase in the number and sophistication of fraud, being perpetrated through spam.

I first became aware of how serious the problem is when I received an email which advised me that an additional person has been authorised to access my online bank account. I am fairly computer literate and well aware of the common deceptions which are delivered by email, but this one looked particularly convincing. So much so that I phoned the bank to check if it was real (of course it wasn’t genuine).

I thought, well, if someone as computer literate as myself could be even half-convinced that the email was genuine, undoubtedly some of the novices on the internet would fall for the trap. If the spammers send out a million emails, they only need to “play the numbers” to uncover a few naive internet users who will fall for the spammers criminal tactics.

I then asked around some of the most computer-literate people I know. Several of them had fallen victim to scams. There is no doubt that these criminals are getting much smarter and more sophisticated in the types of frauds they perpetrate.

For example, one of the most highly computer literate people I know recently fell victim to scam which was related to eBay. He had recently purchased an item on eBay. Shortly afterwards he received an email asking for his credit card details. As the two events happened around the same time, my friend mistakenly thought that the spam was a genuine request from eBay for credit card details. After a day or so my friend realised his mistake, but meanwhile he was defrauded from his credit card account.

Stories abound about people who have fallen for quite simple frauds, such as the Nigerian scam. I believe people need to have some level of common sense to avoid scams as obvious as those. Of greater concern is the new spate of sophisticated spam scams.

Spam statistics show an increase of 30% in the past year. Today, 80% of the email in the world is spam. Why is spam increasing so fast? The answer is simple. Spam fraud is a huge success for the criminals behind it. The more profitable the fraud, the more the criminals will invest in developing smarter methods of stealing money from you.

To make matters worse, some of the people who sell protection software are allegedly the same people who are spreading the problem. There have been some notorious cases of people and organisations who develop new viruses and also sell the anti-virus solutions.

What can you do to protect yourself?

Companies such as Symantec www.symantec.com are selling protection software. (By the way I am not suggesting for one moment that Symantec are doing anything disreputable). But, is a software solution the right way for you go? After all, you have to install it. The other concern about software solutions is that in order for them to work you have to firstly bring the spam into your network. There are many disadvantages to this, including that the traffic itself clogs up your internet link and your server. Also, once the spam is inside your network or your computer, if the spam filter does not deal with it correctly then you will have to deal with the consequences.

I believe there is a simpler and smarter way to protect yourself against spam. The answer is anti-spam managed filtering services. These services come in a couple of different types. Some of the anti-spam services are marketed to large business and government clients.

There are also some anti-spam services which are designed for small to medium businesses. It is even available to individuals. One of the most effective systems for small to medium business is the SpamDetour service – the worldwide link is www.spamdetour.com. In Australia the link is www.spamdetour.com.au

SpamDetour requires no installation or configuration and is therefore suited for people and/or organisations with little or no computer / internet skills.

The biggest advantage of spam filter managed services over software, is that the managed services keep the spam far away from your network and/or your computer. Would you invite criminals inside your house and then deal with the problem of removing them? Obviously not. You would keep the criminals as far away as possible. Yet that’s how most anti-spam systems work; they bring spam into your network to be dealt with. Managed anti-spam services work in a completely different way to software based anti-spam systems. The managed anti spam services create a new location for your email domain, which is generally at an Internet Service Provider site. This acts as a spam trap. Then, once your email reaches the spam trap the filter takes over and directs genuine email to the real user, and it directs spam to a storage area on the anti-spam managed service server where it cannot do any harm to you, the user, or to your business.

Of course, no anti-spam system is 100% accurate. From time to time it is possible that a genuine email will be classified as spam, or that spam will sneak past the filter and reach into your computer or your network. Still, this is much less likely to happen with a managed service than with an in-house spam filter.

The best anti-spam managed services on the market allow you to log in and check your spam to pick up any errors in the system, add blacklists and whitelists, fine tune the system. If you find any genuine emails on the anti spam database you can pick them up from the spam trap and direct them to your own network and computer.

If you are a high-tech internet user, a computer specialist or a large organisation you may well have your anti-spam protection strategy worked out. On the other hand, if you are an individual or a small to medium business then an anti-spam managed service is a simple, practical and cost effective solution.

A major benefit of the anti spam managed service is that it saves time. If you add up the millions of people who have to manually pick spam out of their email every day, waste time dealing with fraudulent spam, read unwanted advertising etc., the cost to the economy is enormous - billions of dollars each year.

Some of the anti-spam managed services offer a free trial or money back guarantee. I believe that anti spam managed services, with the anti-spam technology provided by experts are the only way the world is going to combat the problem of spam.

About The Author:
Michael J. Wilson is an accountant living in Sydney, Australia. One of his interests to develop the internet for the purpose of providing genuine benefits to the community, and to reduce exploitation of the medium.
Article Submitted On: October 13, 2006
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

Manual Article submission Vs Automated Article Submission

So you have made a great article and certainly it needs to be distributed across the web helping lot of readers and generating traffic to your website. A quality article with good information goes a long place over the Internet ensuring loads of one way incoming links, high position in SERPS and permanent traffic propelling your website to new heights.

The first step will be to submit your articles to the article directories. There are hundreds of general and niche article directories which are ready to publish your quality articles with back links to your website(s). The question is how you are going to do the submissions and which directories are you going to submit in? Certainly you don’t want to see your article on “robotics” on a porn article directory or a sports article wrongly placed in the business category on an article directory.

You may have come across

”Completely automated article submission service that submits your article to thousands of publishers around the globe... IN SECONDS!"

and lot of other software’s which claim to automatically submit articles in thousands of article directories. The charges come very cheap and so is the result. Consider the facts before you utilize a software or service to do automatic submission.

Every article directory is unique and they differ in

Allowing html code in the articles
Having links in the main content
Number of links per article which varies from 2-7
Different categories and sections. (Some may have as less as 12 categories while others have more than 100 categories and the category names are not consistent across the directories)
Different types of form input.
Registration and confirmation methods.
CAPTCHA (IMAGE Confirmation) A picture with numbers which have to be manually entered.
Approval of articles
Maximum number of articles per user (some of them restrict to 10 articles/user)
Length of articles.

The best article directories are opposed to Automated Submissions and it is considered to be a SPAM. No automated software or service can take into account the above differences of article directories and submit to the article directories. The fact is most of the article directories do a manual review on articles and submissions and will find out the automated submissions sooner or later.

What is Manual article submission and how it is better than automated article submission?

Manual article submission is the process of analyzing where and what to submit in the directories by humans and doing each and every article submission by hand ensuring a good acceptance rate of articles.

Manual article submission involves

Finding the right article directory, creating an unique account and submitting the articles in the right category.
Modify the articles as per the need of various directories. This involves
Adding and removing html code inside the article as per requirement. Various article directories have different forms to input the articles and the input fields differ from one article directory to other.
Add, Remove, Format and position the links as per specifications. (Some article directories accept only 3 links, some others accept unlimited numbers. Some of the directories accept html codes for links while others have an option in their system for hyper links. Also some directories accept links only in the certain text areas they have provided )
Confirming the article submissions (Image confirmation, email confirmations) wherever needed and co coordinating with the editors of article directories whenever required.
The advantage over automated article submission is,

First and foremost, manual article submission is the only method an article directory approves off and automated article submission is considered as SPAM.
An article directory is organized into categories and subcategories. Editors review each article submission manually and evaluate the article’s relevance with adequate data. In manual article submission the articles are submitted in the related directory under the right category which is not possible in the case of automated article submission. Automated software can't adequately submit to any article directory because it cannot study the directory’s structure and decide which category is best suited.

Articles are submitted according to the different input systems of various directories by manual article submission. Whereas automated submission just posts a set of predefined data irrespective of the input fields which results in an incomplete submission followed by rejection.

No article directory is skipped in manual article submission. Any Image Confirmation and email confirmation is done immediately which is not possible with automated software. Incase for any reason the article directory is down or the article submission is not through, then it will be done another time.

More emphasis on niche article directories related to your website theme.
Good acceptance rate and thus more links compared to an automated submission.

About The Author:
Lazar Stalin works as Internet researcher and promoter for submitinme.com. You can visit the following links to know more about manual submission services from submitinme.com
http://www.submitinme.com/article-submission-service.asp
http://www.submitinme.com/why-submitinme.asp
http://www.submitinme.com/why-article-submission.asp
seo
Published 07/28/2006
Article Source: http://www.EzinePlug.com