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Interview with John Levine on the War on SPAM Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

The first thing you need to be sure is that whatever Internet provider you sign up with has some sort of credible anti-spam. It could be a big one or it could be a little one. You just need to check. There are anti-spam programs that run on your desktop, but they tend to be less effective, because they can only see your spam and can't compare it to everybody else's. One of the most useful ways to filter spam is to suddenly know that you're getting a thousand copies of a message from someplace you've never seen it before. It's almost certainly spam, and the ISP can do that; you can't.

Put an end to spam and phishing by reforming email Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

Even all the anti-spam software, spam filters and schemes for authenticating inbound email and making senders click links to verify real people didn't really stop spam, because the spammers got creative. They said, "We can send emails with keywords that aren't spelled in a way filters will recognize, or we can send a message that looks like a lot of text, but it's really just a graphic, so there are no keywords to filter out." They can come up with any number of other tricks to keep sending spam to honest internet users all over the world. And they do.

Interview with Loren McDonald, vice president of marketing at EmailLabs Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

Mike: I was curious to get more of your thoughts on why organizations such as the Direct Marketing Association really fought against anti-spam legislation for a long time. They accepted the federal bill at the last minute, but I think that's only because that overwrote the much stronger California bill. McDonald: Right. Ultimately, it was a good thing. Many of us in the industry were not particularly happy with the DMA's stance on that. Again, it points out that there is kind of a divide between traditional direct marketers and members of the DMA.

Interview with Ralph Wilson on email marketing and e-commerce Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

Now we're seeing failure in negotiations for anti-spam technology. Where do you think email is headed? Is it a discredited medium from here on, or what is going to happen? Wilson: Well, it is hard to predict the future. There are several things, I think. One is, I think we should all write our congressman and insist that the FTC enforce the CAN-SPAM Act. I think if the CAN-SPAM Act were enforced, we would see the amount of spam decrease. To the best of my knowledge, the federal government has not enforced this, or if they have, they have been very quiet about it.

Mike: Recently, we saw headlines about the failure of the sender ID idea -- not so much an anti-spam, but more an anti-phishing solution. The working group has been disbanded, and Microsoft patent issues got in the way. It is dead, and that's a great setback. Wilson: I never liked that approach anyway. It sounded like a moneymaker for Microsoft. Mike: Probably. That's what happens. Wilson: I'm not a Microsoft hater in any way, but it seemed like a pay-a-toll approach, which I don't think is appropriate.

Interview with Jeanne Jennings, Online Marketing Consultant Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

The big guys out there at AOL and MSN can't seem to get along and agree on an anti-spam standards. What do you think will play out with this? Jennings: I think we'll come to a standard. I actually spoke to AOL and MSN at a conference in Chicago, and I think we're going to come around. Everyone really wants the same thing in the end. While they're advocating different ways to get there, I don't think they're as far apart as we are necessarily led to believe in the press. Mike: I hope you're right. Jennings: I hope I'm right, too. Mike: We all need it in the industry.

Interview with John Levine on the War on SPAM Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

Levine: I'd say the war on spam is about where World War I was in 1916 -- you know, it's gotten to the point where it's way worse than either side though it was going to be, and although I think we're starting to see some progress on the anti-spam side, we still have an awful lot more work to do. Mike: Do you think that a solution, then, is many years away? Levine: I don't think we're ever going to see anybody finally turn a switch and have spam stop, but I do think many of the most egregiously criminal spammers are going to be stopped, basically by social and legal means.

There's at least one significant criminal trial coming up where, with any luck, they'll put the spammer in jail, and we're seeing lots of civil trials where the recipient ISPs are finally starting to take advantage of some of the anti-spam laws we have now. They go after the spammers and start getting large judgments against them. Since the incentive for spam is basically financial, the solutions are basically going to be financial too. In the meantime, we're always going to have to use filtering. It's basically a social problem with social answers.

Mike: You're the author of Fighting Spam for Dummies and Internet for Dummies -- how did you become this spam guru, or I should say anti-spam guru? Levine: Out of desperation. Since I've literally had the same email address since 1993, I have been getting spam pretty much longer than anybody, and starting with some of my earliest Dummies books in 1993, I started putting email addresses in all my books so that my readers can write to me, and I've gotten hundreds of thousands of comments -- even a three-page treatise on what someone liked in the book and what they didn't.

There are anti-spam programs that run on your desktop, but they tend to be less effective, because they can only see your spam and can't compare it to everybody else's. One of the most useful ways to filter spam is to suddenly know that you're getting a thousand copies of a message from someplace you've never seen it before. It's almost certainly spam, and the ISP can do that; you can't. So filtering is the first thing. The second is hiding.

It's an actual grassroots anti-spam organization, of which I am a member of the board, and we have no budget and no meetings and no secret handshakes, but you can join if you go to cauce.org. If you join, you basically tell us where you live and what congressional district you're in, so in case some new spam legislation comes up, we can figure out whether it's worth lobbying your particular representative. CAUCE has been somewhat effective in shaping spam legislation.

Email privacy now a top concern for 19 out of 20 internet users Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

I created it out of frustration in seeing the email community fail to come up with realistic anti-spam solutions even after years of negotiation and bickering among the top ISPs. The Relemail service has been designed to enhance trust between responsible email senders and their email recipients. What Relemail certification means to you as an organization is that you're going to get more subscriptions even when you don't have any additional traffic.

Email privacy audit results published for 1,000 firms at Relemail.com Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

These ratings are the result of a secret audit conducted by Relemail that sought to determine the email privacy practices and anti-spam compliance behaviors of the top organizations on the internet. Each firm is given a rating from one to five stars, with five stars indicating full compliance with all fifteen points monitored by the audit. Some of the firms achieving full five-star ratings include eBay, Kohler, Bart's Water Sports and Global Computer. The ratings are the first of their kind focused strictly on email privacy and best practices behaviors.

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ABOUT THE CREATOR OF NATURALPEDIA: Mike Adams, the creator of this NaturalNews Naturalpedia, is the editor of NaturalNews.com, the internet's top natural health news site, creator of the Honest Food Guide (www.HonestFoodGuide.org), a free downloadable consumer food guide based on natural health principles, author of Grocery Warning, The 7 Laws of Nutrition, Natural Health Solutions, and many other books available at www.TruthPublishing.com, creator of the earth-friendly EcoLEDs company (www.EcoLEDs.com) that manufactures energy-efficient LED lighting products, founder of Arial Software (www.ArialSoftware.com), a permission e-mail technology company, creator of the CounterThink Cartoon series (www.NaturalNews.com/index-cartoons.html) and author of over 1,500 articles, interviews, special reports and reference guides available at www.NaturalNews.com. Adams' personal philosophy and health statistics are available at www.HealthRanger.org.