An Introduction To Spam Filters
Using spam filters is another very effective way of combating spam or junk mail. These programs use some keywords like ‘guaranteed’, ‘free’, etc and block any email with those words in them. But this has the disadvantage of sometimes blocking even important mails from your contacts and preventing those senders from sending mails to your address again. The way out is to use add-on spam filters which allow you to control the content that should be allowed into your inbox. This will save you a lot of time and energy as you no longer will have go through each and every email before identifying it as spam and eliminating it.
Spam filters can be installed on any computer system and aim at filtering junk and getting only relevant information to the user.
Setting up a simple spam filter can be very easy. Identify the section ‘filters’ in your email program and create a new filter. Lay down the rules or filter conditions for the new folder. These can be the parameters under which an email would be marked as spam and deleted from your inbox. If you prefer to look at the filtered mail before deleting it, you can choose the option to move it to another folder once it is filtered. Once you save the changes you have made in the new filter, it will be active.
You have a new variety of spam filters in the market now which are called ‘smarter filters’. While these fight and prevent spam very effectively, setting it up is a very complex process and is recommended only for technical experts.
New generation spam filters are different from traditional ones in that they go in for statistical data rather features of spam. These filters decide on spam by analyzing the entire email and comparing it with other already identified spam mails. The error margin for these filters is almost zero as more than 99% of scams are identified and eliminated through this method.
Getting Rid Of Those Annoying Pop-Ups
There’s nothing worse than getting on the internet and using your browser only to get 10 pop up windows in a row. It seems like someone on the other end is controlling your windows and what you see. If you do have that problem, then somewhere along the way, a spyware program that throws pop-up ads on your screen was downloaded or your system was infiltrated by a hacker.
These spyware programs install themselves into your system when you download file-swapping programs. These programs can also track and record keyboard strokes that you use and depending on where you go on the internet, it throws pop up ads into your browser. Spyware can find holes in your browser and will not let you see the site that you want to view until you answer their pop up ad. How annoying and time consuming!
Some spyware programs will develop a folder in your Windows Program Folder called “Common Files”. Even if you go to delete these files from the folder, they seem to multiply or stay there. That’s because they have embedded themselves in the Windows System registry and in other unknown places through your directory. To get these files out, you have the clean the registry, reload it and get rid of the spyware programs all at once!
McAfee Internet Suite and Symantec Norton Anti-Virus Suite have spyware protection programs that are very efficient. If you don’t have these programs (and you should), Ad-aware is a good program that scans your files to find spyware. Now there are two versions, the one that is free that provides limited protection and the program that you pay for that gives you full protection. Stopzilla is another good program that sweeps the folders and the registry of where these programs hide themselves at.
The average user doesn’t have time to clear out 15 pop up windows. Go and check your internet suite package to see if you have the spyware protection on and if not, make sure that you initialize it to stop those annoying pop-ups!
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Changing Web Hosting Services
Sometimes, to get the service you want, you have to make changes. Things happen, especially with web hosting providers. Your host services may have taken a performance dip or you may have notice a lack of customer support. You make a decision to change host providers and you go with it. You have to be smart about changing over so here are some steps for you to consider.
Backup Your Files – Most people don’t perform backups of their files on their web servers. That’s bad because if something does happen, you lose everything. Make sure that you backup your files before you switch providers. Don’t forget to copy some files, designs, graphics, databases, or emails prior to discontinuing your present hosting service. Otherwise you will find that once you are no longer a customer, all of your data is wiped clean.
Get a compatible host for your business – Many customers switch web hosting providers not even considering researching the host services to see if they are compatible. Find out if the new provider supports your applications or files. This is important when it comes to server side scripts, shopping cart systems, merchant accounts, e-commerce software, SSL security. make sure they can support your operation and applications.
Know Your Transfer Settings – One fundamental step in transferring your site to a new web hosting provider is going to be to change name servers for your domain. Don’t wait until the last minute to do this. Waiting too late could mean your site and domain name could be down for a few days.
Make sure that everything goes smooth if your old host goes out of business or if something happens, such as a change in service that would prompt you to look for another web host. Treat it as a marriage! Make sure your new web host is compatible.
Do People Know Where Your Are on the Web?
The question is, “can you be tracked down on the internet?”
Your IP address is no secret. It’s a basic part of internet communication protocols to send your IP address whenever you connect to another site, request a web page, chat, play an online game, etc. Without your IP address, the computer on the other end wouldn’t know where to send the reply.
But that doesn’t mean that Evildoers can find your house if they know your IP address. Each time you go online (if you have dialup) or each time you start your computer (Cable or DSL) you are assigned an IP address, randomly selected from a pool of IP’s assigned to your Internet service provider (ISP).
So a person MIGHT be able to get a general idea of your geographic location, based on your IP address, by doing a lookup on the WHOIS database, but that will only tell them the physical location of your ISP — not YOUR home address.
And if you use a large regional or nationwide ISP, the IP lookup probably reveals nothing of interest. For example, if you are an AOL subscriber, your IP address lookup will show the location as Dulles, Virginia — regardless of where you live.
There is an exception to every rule. If a stranger calls your ISP and wants to know who was using a certain IP address last Tuesday, the ISP will tell them to go away. But if an officer of the law hands your ISP a court order to reveal that information, they must do so. Your ISP’s logs will enable them to determine which customer was using a certain IP address on a certain date & time, and they must reveal that information if a court has found probable cause for criminal activity.
But for the truly paranoid (or the criminally inclined) there are ways to surf the web anonymously. There are services that will act as a proxy between you and your ISP, and they claim that your information cannot be subpoenaed because they do not store it.
What About Email Addresses?
The same concepts apply to your email address. The part that follows the “@” sign is your ISP’s domain name. And given the domain name, one can determine the ISP’s physical location, but nothing personally identifying about the email user without a court order.
Web-based email accounts are not truly anonymous, either. Even if you don’t provide your real name when signing up, they can capture your IP address and track you through your ISP if necessary.
Is Your Web-Site Configured Correctly?
Site design and structure is a lot of work. One of the most important considerations is often overlooked by first-time site owners is content management and structure. Where to put it and how to display it? What is the message that you are trying to get across?
If you don’t consider content management and structure in the design of your site, your site won’t perform at optimized levels. It’s as simple as that.
You won’t be getting good results as far as site visitation.
Does your site have all of these qualities?
* Attention grabbing headlines that make a person look and investigate.
* Compact statements
* Meaningful words: Discover, Learn, Investigate, Make Money, etc.
* Sub-headings that lead the eye from top-to-bottom, left-to-right on each page.
* Graphics that support the brand or products (not stale, seen-it-before clip art).
* Professional sales copy to explain your product.
* Do you have a host that is good and guarantees you plenty of uptime?
If you are debuting your site without all these key factors, you may be in trouble before you even start out.
If you are struggling, you should get a good web consultant or web marketing team to assist you with site development. If your business depends on your web sales, don’t be cheap! Put in the time, effort and money to get a professional to develop your site for you.
When people come to your site, they want to see professionalism and organization. If there want to buy a coat then you need to show them the picture of the coat. People don’t like reading long statements on web sites. They just want brevity and clarity and then want to check out what you’ve got to sell or what type of service you provide.
If your web site is out of whack, get professional help. That even addresses branding because in a lot of businesses, your URL is your brand name. Get help if your business is web dependant!
The Funky Worm
Back in 1974, the funk group, the Ohio Players made a song called “Funky Worm”. What inspired the group to write this song may have been prophetic vision or just plain luck. The “Funky Worm” was similar to what a worm virus does to a computer system
The Funky Worm was a bad concept. The “worm” had the ability to render destruction while being cool and hidden at the same time. Whoever at the internet association must have been a band member of the Ohio Players or a big fan of the group. Anyway, a computer worm is one bad thing to have on your system.
A worm is a sub-class of a computer virus and they usually spread from system to system. This is the difference. A computer virus usually needs the help of a person (many times through ignorance) to spread amongst computers. A worm does not need that assistance; therefore, that’s why it has its name.
A worm actually has more knowledge of public transportation than the average American citizen. You see, your computer has ports that send data and transmissions out to other computers. Worms hang out at the port like bums trying to get a ride from New York to Florida via these “roads” or “lines of transportation”. It doesn’t even have to pay a fare. Why drive (like a computer virus) when all you have to do is stand at the port and get on the next thing smoking to South Beach?
A worm can duplicate itself on your system so that means that it has the capability to send out children that look just like it! Once again, it seems like these viruses and worms go straight for the email address book. Worms can use emails to send a copy of itself (uninvited of course) to every person that you have in your virtual phone book. Therefore, they have a guest that they don’t want either!
Worms can also crash web servers by duplicating themselves. It can stop geographical systems to stop working. They wreak havoc on system memory and if you are on the internet, take up bandwidth. Worms are definitely BAD!
Again, good virus protection software can catch a funky worm any day of the week. The key is to keep your subscription updated.
Is it by chance that the Ohio Players had this in mind when they wrote that song?
Google’s Tag To Remove Content Spamming
Content spamming, in its simplest form, is the taking of content from other sites that rank well on the search engines, and then either using it as-it-is or using a utility software like Articlebot to scramble the content to the point that it can’t be detected with plagiarism software. In either case, your good, search-engine-friendly content is stolen and used, often as part of a doorway page, to draw the attention of the search engines away from you.
Everyone has seen examples of this: the page that looks promising but contains lists of terms (like term – term paper – term papers – term limits) that link to other similar lists, each carrying Google advertising. Or the site that contains nothing but content licensed from Wikipedia. Or the site that plays well in a search but contains nothing more than SEO gibberish, often ripped off from the site of an expert and minced into word slaw.
These sites are created en masse to provide a fertile ground to draw eyeballs. It seems a waste of time when you receive a penny a view for even the best-paying ads – but when you put up five hundred sites at a time, and you’ve figured out how to get all of them to show up on the first page or two of a lucrative Google search term, it can be surprisingly profitable.
The losers are the people who click on these pages, thinking that there is content of worth on these sites – and you. Your places are stolen from the top ten by these spammers. Google is working hard to lock them out, but there is more that you can do to help Google.
Using The Antispam Tag
But there is another loser. One of the strengths of the Internet is that it allows for two-way public communication on a scale never seen before. You post a blog, or set up a wiki; your audience comments on your blog, or adds and changes your wiki.
The problem? While you have complete control over a website and its contents in the normal way of things, sites that allow for user communication remove this complete control from you and give it to your readers. There is no way to prevent readers of an open blog from posting unwanted links, except for manually removing them. Even then, links can be hidden in commas or periods, making it nearly impossible to catch everything.
This leaves you open to the accusation of link spam – for links you never put out there to begin with. And while you may police the most recent several blogs you’ve posted, no one polices the ones from several years ago. Yet Google still looks at them and indexes them. By 2002, bloggers everywhere were begging Google for an ignore tag of some sort to prevent its spiders from indexing comment areas.
Not only, they said, would bloggers be grateful; everyone with two-way uncontrolled communication – wikis, forums, guest books – needed this service from Google. Each of these types of sites has been inundated with spam at some point, forcing some to shut down completely. And Google itself needed it to help prevent the rampant spam in the industry.
In 2005, Google finally responded to these concerns. Though their solution is not everything the online community wanted (for instance, it leads to potentially good content being ignored as well as spam), it does at least allow you to section out the parts of your blog that are public. It is the “nofollow” attribute.
“Nofollow” allows you to mark a portion of your web page, whether you’re running a blog or you want to section out paid advertising, as an area that Google spiders should ignore. The great thing about it is that not only does it keep your rankings from suffering from spam, it also discourages spammers from wasting your valuable comments section with their junk text.
The most basic part of this attribute involves embedding it into a hyperlink as . This allows you to manually flag links, such as those embedded in paid advertising, as links Google spiders should ignore. But what if the content is user-generated? It’s still a problem because you certainly don’t have time to go through and mark all those links up.
Fortunately, blogging systems have been sensitive to this new development. Whether you use WordPress or another blogging system, most have implemented either automated “nofollow” links in their comment sections, or have issued plugins you can implement yourself to prevent this sort of spamming.
This does not solve every problem. But it’s a great start. Be certain you know how your user-generated content system provides this service to you. In most cases, a software update will implement this change for you.
Is This Spamming And Will Google Block Me?
There’s another problem with the spamming crowd. When you’re fighting search engine spam and start seeing the different forms it can take – and, disturbingly, realizing that some of your techniques for your legitimate site are similar – you have to wonder: Will Google block me for my search engine optimization techniques?
This happened recently to BMW’s corporate site. Their webmaster, dissatisfied with the dealership’s position when web users searched for several terms (such as “new car”), created and posted a gateway page – a page optimized with text that then redirects searchers to an often graphics-heavy page.
Google found it and, rightly or wrongly, promptly dropped their page rank manually to zero. For weeks, searches for their site turned up plenty of spam and dozens of news stories – but to find their actual site, it was necessary to drop to the bottom of the search, not easy to do in Googleworld.
This is why you really need to understand what Google counts as search engine spam, and adhere to their restrictions even if everyone else doesn’t. Never create a gateway page, particularly one with spammish data. Instead, use legitimate techniques like image alternate text and actual text in your page. Look for ways to get other pages to point to your site – article submission, for instance, or directory submission. And keep your content fresh, always.
While duplicated text is often a sign of serious spammage, the Google engineers realize two things: first, the original text is probably still out there somewhere, and it’s unfair to drop that person’s rankings along with those who stole it from them; and second, certain types of duplicated text, like articles or blog entries, are to be expected.
Their answer to the first issue is to credit the site first catalogued with a particular text as the creator, and to drop sites obviously spammed from that one down a rank. The other issue is addressed by looking at other data around the questionable data; if the entire site appears to be spammed, it, too, is dropped. Provided you are not duplicating text on many websites to fraudulently increase your ranking, you’re safe. Ask yourself: are you using the same content on several sites registered to you in order to maximize your chances of being read? If the answer is yes, this is a bad idea and will be classified as spamdexing. If your content would not be useful to the average Internet surfer, it is also likely to be classed as spamdexing.
There is a very thin line between search engine optimization and spamdexing. You should become very familiar with it. Start with understanding hidden/invisible text, keyword stuffing, metatag stuffing, gateway pages, and scraper sites.
There Are Other Web Browsers Out There!
So you think that Internet Explorer is the only browser out there? Actually, there are other browsers out there that are better and more efficient than IE. Let’s examine the following:
Safari:
Safari is the browser of for most Mac users. It’s faster than Internet Explorer and contains a built-in Google Search, tabbed interface to browse multiple sites at once, automatic form completion and more. Free to download.
Mozilla:
Mozilla is open source software. Mozilla is for Windows, Linux or Mac users. Browse several sites at once with the tabbed interface, block pop-up ads and it even includes IRS Chat. It has a great email client with great spam blockers and filters
Opera:
For Windows, Linux and Mac users alike. There are two versions; one free (which is ad supported) or for 39.00, you can get the ad-free version. Opera is extremely fast with built-in email clients that includes spam filters. It also contains the usual pop-up blockers.
OmniWeb:
An award-winning Web browser strictly for Mac users. Cost is 39.95. Features include ad blocking, history searching, website change notifications, even speech recognition.
Netscape Navigator:
Microsoft’s’ chief rival is still around. Netscape 7.1 is based on Mozilla architecture. Free to download.
FireFox:
Firefox (aka Firebird) is an express version version of Mozilla and built for speed. It’s only a browser with no built-in email client, so if you need email you’ll want to download its companion, Thunderbird. Those who love Mozilla will find many of the same features here. With Firefox you can block pop ups, customize the toolbars; even change its appearance with the use of themes. For Windows, Linux and Mac users. Free.
Avant Browser:
A tabbed browser that’s really fast and allows you to view multiple websites in a split window interface. Free
So there are alternatives that are better than Internet Explorer. Go ahead and try a different browser! Be different!
Trojan Horse Viruses
The final categorization of viruses is the mighty Trojan Horse.
The Trojan Horse is pseudo like software that appears harmless but once you install the software, look out! It causes more problems than you could ever think of!
Trojan Horse viruses try to emulate software that is legitimate from a well known company. For example, Windows software was being emulated on file sharing servers only to find out that after downloaded, it was not a Windows based program by spyware or worms in the files that quickly spread over your entire system.
Trojans are really annoying because they change system settings without you knowing it and include extra icons to your desktop that initialize and pop up at the most unwanted times while you are trying to use your computer. Many Trojans can cause serious data loss and be targeted to wipe out your “My Documents” folder in your Windows Operating System. Microsoft Word defaults all documents to this folder.
Trojans also create a way for hackers to get into your system which allows for your personal and confidential information to be compromised. Trojans don’t replicate or reproduce like other files.
Trojans can also appear as bundled or blended threat viruses and worms. One Trojan can open the door to your system. Another Trojan can go straight to the computer register and write malicious code to the register while another Trojan can release worms into your system. These threats can cause major damage and downtime to your system.
Trojans are really powerful and you should by all means pay attention to virus postings and warnings from Microsoft and other reputable computer companies. Some Trojans have been so powerful that in the past, they have gotten front page coverage, such as the Anthrax Trojan threat a few years back.
Certainly, a Trojan Horse threat is nothing to play with. These Trojans have been known to knock out government data systems and reconfigure critical, sensitive military data. You should use full protection in battling Trojan Horse viruses.
Spammers And Spam Hunters
Sometimes I don’t know which people are the worst. Those that spam or those that say they are going after spammers.
I deleted 145 spam posts on one of my blogs today. Fortunately I have moderate comments turned on so they never actually get posted. That makes the spammers bad, but that’s the worst inconvenience spammers have caused me.
However those that supposedly are our Spam saviors. Those that say they are fighting spam have caused me more problems than the spammers themselves.
Sorbs.net lists your domain name as a spam domain name if you happen to be hosted on or near the same IP address as the spammers. Therefore you are guilty by association.
To get your domain name removed off of sorbs.net’s list, you have to give them money. Sounds a lot like extortion since they manually add you to the list then ask you for money to be removed.
Then of course they tell you that they give the money to charity. I checked out the charity they say they give the money to. It goes to a legal defense fund they could use to defend themselves if you sued them. Some charity.
Twice now blogger.com has caused me spamconvenience. They have locked me out of one of my own blogs and one I manage for a client because their spambot said it might be spam. It also says that if you are a human reading this message then of course I am not likely a spambot and they will correct the situation.
They did this even though on that blog they require me to type into the little box whatever crazy letters they have in the little graphic to make each post on that same blog.
Half the time the little picture isn’t even there. So you cannot type the little letters into the box because the little letters don’t exist. So how can they use that method to make sure I am not spamming, then flag it as a spam blog?
However since I get paid to blog daily on the client’s blog, my loss of income, that I am sure Google will not reimburse me for, is just that lost income due to the spam fighters.
They did this today to the client’s blog. They are reviewing it they say. Like to see that blog? Go to http://hotelsandapartments.blogspot.com It’s not spam.
The first time it happened was one day after I created the blog. It had exactly one post in it. Wow, what a spammer I am. They blocked me from logging in but sent me a very nice email, which I had not opted in for, saying they would be glad to review that blog too. They even provided a nice link to where I could fill out a form to request a review.
When I followed their nice link in the unsolicited email, (not spam), they sent me, it asked me to log in using the username and password that THEY HAD ALREADY BLOCKED ME FROM USING!
So that blog had to be rebuilt elsewhere. Again, I have had way more trouble from spam fighters than I ever have had from spammers. Well, that’s all for my rant. Now I have to see if I can get the little picture below to load so I can see what stupid letters I have to type into the box so you can see this post.