The Content Blender

Ever have a mosquito in your bedroom at night? Oh, man. There you are, nice and happy, about to fall asleep when, zzzzzzz, there’s this irritating buzzing in your ear. You whack at the source. The zzzzzzz stops. You got it. Good.

But wait a few minutes and, zzzzzzz, there it is again. You take another swipe, then another. Maybe you even jump out of bed and flick on the lights. But you can’t find that crazy mosquito. Or maybe you do find it, and gladly squish it.

Then you go back to bed and are almost asleep when, zzzzzzz. Yes, another mosquito. Who invited these things to the party? Didn’t you put screens on the windows to stop this very thing? Can’t the mayor do something about it?

That’s what SPAM is like.

SPAM is when someone sends one email to a whole bunch of people who were minding their own business and didn’t ask to receive the email. Suddenly it appears in your Inbox, uninvited and rather annoying.

So how do you stop it? Simple, delete the email. But then you get another one from the same spammer. You might try to tell them to take you off their list. And they might actually take you off their list (or not). You might try to block their emails so you just don’t get them in your Inbox. But even if that works, another spammer will find your email address somehow and start sending you other SPAM emails.

Tired of all the unsolicited emails, you might get serious and get anti-spam software (it might even come with your anti-virus software). And that might stop most of the SPAM. But why can’t SPAM be stopped all together?

Well, the mayor might not be able to do anything about stopping SPAM, but the US Government is taking it seriously. In 2004, their CAN-SPAM Act became law, dealing with email “whose primary purpose is advertising or promoting a commercial product or service, including content on a Web site.”
–quoted from http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.htm

And that’s why SPAM is like a mosquito in your bedroom at night.

Copyright (c) Grant Pasay 2005. All rights reserved.
You may forward this article in its entirety (including author bio/links) to anyone you wish.

Grant Pasay is a professional website copywriter, advertising copywriter, and SEO copywriter serving clients in Vancouver, BC and everywhere. Grant is also the author of the FREE e-book, “The Internet Is Like A Refrigerator.”

For copy that captures your business message without any of the hassle, go to http://grantpasay.com/

Check out Grant’s FREE e-book at http://grantpasay.com/refrigerator/

There are hundreds of thousands of people who are trying to make an honest living on the Internet these days. The Internet is a great opportunity for starting your own business. There is not a lot of start-up cost, you can reach the whole world from a small corner of your own house, and the income can be exceptional.

However, a lot of us publishers and Internet marketers are running into a serious problem.

Before I start talking about it, I want to ask you all a question - How many of you get junk snail mail? Everyone, right? Now, how many of you call the cops when you get it? None, right? Of course not because that would be ridiculous!

We simply throw it in the trash and forget about it. Very easy, right?

What I don’t understand is why it is not as simple as that with your email. We have all received junk email, also known as sp~m. Just junk mail of the Internet, right? So why do so many people make such a big deal about it??? I know that reputable publishers and marketers have been reported to “sp~m cops” and were caused serious problems because of it. And why? Not because they have done anything wrong, but because a subscriber forgot they subscribed to the ezine or they forgot they requested information or some other foolish reason.

Now we have to deal with a thing called “sp~m filters”! Not only do these “filters” keep legitimate ezines, emails, reports, etc. from going through, but the amount of sp~m has only increased! These “filters” are also causing many problems for publishers and subscribers alike!

I have also had an experience of being reported for sp~m. Someone requested one of my articles by autoresponder. Well, they received the article and then a couple of days later a follow-up thank you note. Apparently this thank you note pi**ed them off because they reported me to my ISP. I then received a phone call from my ISP telling me my email account was going to be cancelled immediately! Well, it took me awhile, but I finally was able to explain that the person who received that email had to have requested my article by autoresponder. There was no other way he could have gotten that message.

So, I was able to save my account, but I know of several people who didn’t get off so easy.

I rarely gripe about anything like this because I know a lot of computer problems are out of our control, but this is a problem caused by people, not machines!

This is really getting out of hand…..so I have come up with a very simple yet effective idea for getting rid of sp~m! Are you ready for this???

Ok, first you click on the sp~m message in your inbox. Make the determination ( be sure now) that it is, indeed, sp~m. Then you stick up your index or other finger if you prefer ( be nice now) and push the magic button marked D-E-L-E-T-E. This will make the sp~m magically disappear!

I have used this method of sp~m destruction since starting on the Internet and have found it to be most effective. I receive hundreds of sp~m messages a day, but always manage to make each and every one disappear forever!

I also have some tips for people who do not want to receive any so-called sp~m:

1. Do Not subscribe to any newsletters!

2. Do Not sign-up for special offers!

3. Do Not request any information via autoresponder!

4. Do Not send any email to anyone at anytime!

5. Do Not use your email for any reason whatsoever!

I assure you if you follow all these tips you will never receive any sp~m!

I know I have been a little ridiculous in making my point, but that just is my point. All this hullabaloo about sp~m is ridiculous. It is simply junk mail and can be deleted without any trouble, hassle or problems!

Try it a few times and you will soon be like me - I have the fastest delete finger in the Midwest!! Anyone care to challenge me??

Wishing you a wonderfully warm and joyous Christmas!

About The Author

Terri Seymour owns and operates MyOwnEzine.com.

Learn to publish and promote your own ezine. mailto:subscribe@myownezine.com.

For a complete list of her articles available for reprint please email: mailto:myownezine-index@getresponse.com

You can contact her at mailto:ter02@newnorth.net

So What Makes a Good Spam Filter Anyway? By Alan Hearnshaw

Spam Filters. Most of us know we need one. Some of know we need a better one, but how many stop to think what actually makes a good spam filter in the first place?

This is not just a rhetorical question. It is a question that many users - and many developers - do not ask, and consequently, goes unanswered.

Maybe this could be better answered by defining here the qualities of the perfect spam filter. We’ll call our perfect spam filter the “SpamSplatter 3000″. Here are some of the defining qualities of “SpamSplatter 3000″

1. It requires zero interaction from the user. 2. It produces zero false positives (good messages identified as bad) and zero false negatives (bad messages identified as good). 3. It is transparent - that is, you only ever see good messages and never need even be aware that spam exists.

That’s it. Not much of a shopping list is it? Of course, “SpamSplatter 3000″ hasn’t been invented yet (and if it does, I want a piece of the action), but it does give us a frame of reference when looking for the best filter we can find.

Let’s take each point in turn:

It requires zero interaction from the user There are two kinds of filters that come near to this ideal currently: Bayesian Filters and Community Filters. Bayesian filters strip messages down to small “word bites”, or tokens and maintain a database containing lists of good and bad tokens. When a new message is encountered, the filter strips this message down to tokens, compares it to the database, and applies a formula based on the British scientist Alan Bayes’ formula for probability calculation. Over time, the Bayesian filter “learns” the characteristics of spam messages.

Community Filters simply work on a voting system whereby every user that receives a spam message “votes” it as spam. This information is stored on a central server and when enough votes are received the message is banned from all users in the community.

As can be seen, the user interaction from these types of filters is mainly limited to two button operation - correcting wrongly identified messages - and the more accurate the filter, the less those buttons are used.

OK, so that’s pretty good. Not exactly zero interaction, but if the filter is accurate enough, then it should be pretty near. That brings us to point two:

It produces zero false positives or negatives This is the area in which most spam filter development is concentrating and things are getting pretty good nowadays. It is not at all unusual to see an efficient modern filter achieve accuracy of 96% or better. It is, of course, far better to have a false negative than a false positive if you are ever going to tear yourself away from the killed mail folder!

Of course, by definition, community filters cannot reach 100% accuracy as someone has to be getting the spam to be voting it as such! Theoretically, a Bayesian filter may be able to eventually get quite close to 100% accuracy, so at least there is hope there. Content based filters (those that look for certain words, phrases or other indicators in a message to identify it as spam), will almost certainly not get much higher accuracy figures than the best of them can achieve today. Adapting to changing spam requires new filters to be created on an ongoing basis.

And finally, we come to the holy grail of spam filtering:

It is transparent Strangely enough, not enough work seems to be done in trying to achieve this goal. Some of the best filters on the market today identify spam with impressive accuracy and then simply place them in a “killed mail” folder for your later perusal. Now, forgive me if I’m missing something here, but isn’t the point to save you having to wade through the junk mail? Isn’t that what you bought the filter for? With the “SpamSplatter 3000″, you don’t need to do that.

As we haven’t achieved 100% accuracy yet (and probably never will), the only way to free us from checking the killed mail folder is a challenge/response system. This is where a message is automatically sent back to the sender requiring them to take some action for their message to actually be delivered.

Some systems tend to go overboard with the challenge/response system. These systems - often called “Whitelist” systems - block messages from anyone that isn’t in the user’s friends list. Guaranteed 100% effective, but too drastic a measure for most users.

Now, it seems that the most intelligent use of this system would be to send challenges only to messages that were flagged as “questionable”. Good message can be delivered, definite spam can be deleted and questionable ones would earn themselves a challenge message.

So, to sum up, let’s rewrite the qualities of our perfect filter and get a shopping list of what to look for while we wait for the “SpamSplatter 3000″ to arrive:

1. Simple, minimal setup and maintenance. 2. Extremely low rate of false positives and as few false negatives as possible. 3. A transparent “fail-safe” mechanism whereby the victims of those false positives can force the message through to you.

It’s simple really. Now, who’s going to build me this “SpamSplatter 3000″…?

Alan Hearnshaw is the owner of http://www.WhichSpamFilter.com, a site which provides weekly in-depth spam filter reviews, user help and guidance and a community forum. alan@whichspamfilter.com

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