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

Mike: It seems like many of the spam filters today are overly sensitive because of all the spam being sent. McDonald: Right. Mike: I'm sure you'll agree that if the spam sending is reduced through these various measures, then the spam filters can relax a bit and have fewer cases where they are blocking legitimate emails? McDonald: I think that's also where the authentication and reputation comes in. If your emails are authenticated and you do have a good reputation, then you don't have to worry so much about every word.

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

Filtering is filtering, and the most effective spam filters are ones that people's internet providers use, and by and large, most internet providers have reasonably effective filtering. EarthLink has extremely sophisticated stuff. I was down there talking to them a couple of weeks ago, and they have a bunch of stuff they wrote themselves, and they use a bunch of commercial services, and they actually do a pretty good job of keeping the spam out. America Online has fantastically sophisticated spam filters.

Web marketing guru Jim Sterne gives advice on how to successfully utilize customer emails Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

If spam is reduced dramatically or eliminated technically, then I don't need spam filters anymore, and I will see all of the newsletters I've ever signed up for. Mike: All on the same morning, probably. Sterne: I don't know -- if that happens, I think it will be the morning after because we're going to have some serious celebration. Mike: Oh yeah, time to party. Now, let's talk about the email marketing professionals -- the people sending the emails.

Health is a result of action, not luck: Principles for achieving optimum health Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

This is one of the great seductions of the drugs and cosmetics industries, and I cover this in more detail in my book, "Spam Filters For Your Brain," which you'll find at TruthPublishing.com. It explains ten different seductions that these industries use to manipulate people into buying worthless products. The best way to sabotage your health results is to obsess over them A truly healthy person realizes that a health result is something that unfolds naturally. It is not something that a person aims for.

President of eMarketing Association, Robert Fleming, discusses e-marketing certification and the current state of spam Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

People are using different spam filters. There are solutions, and I think it's something that we just need to get through. It's unfortunate that it's out there, and certainly we're vehemently against it because it undermines e-commerce. The fault lies especially with these people who are fraudulently going after people's bank accounts through identity theft. When you think about it, it just underscores the fact that this is a very important thing for business to understand and to work with. Mike: Right. There's been a lot of attention paid this past year to staying compliant with CAN-SPAM.

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

So, the first trend is just understanding that between things like the "Do Not Call" list, inbox spam filters, legislations such as CAN SPAM and the knowledge that consumers have today, I believe that when you add all these things up it has brought on this era of customer control, where the consumer or recipient believes they have control over the kind of marketing messages being sent to them.

In other words, those of us who are in the marketing industry have been talking about spam filters and delivery issues pretty seriously for probably the last 18 months, and definitely the last 12 months. It's been an issue. There have been lots of articles in the press. What I've discovered is that a lot of marketers and clients out there haven't necessarily been paying attention. They haven't necessarily realized that they might have an issue. They weren't aware of the problem like those of us that have been in the industry dealing with it fulltime.

Mike: I'm sure you'll agree that if the spam sending is reduced through these various measures, then the spam filters can relax a bit and have fewer cases where they are blocking legitimate emails? McDonald: I think that's also where the authentication and reputation comes in. If your emails are authenticated and you do have a good reputation, then you don't have to worry so much about every word. We see clients that are in the travel industry who send out the travel deals. They might have legitimate but aggressive copy.

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

Wilson: One of the most widely used spam filters is Spam Assassin. Spam Assassin gives a 4.6-point credit for anyone using the habeas header. Since the default is five points to be credited to spam, you can take off 4.6 points and that means you have a pretty good chance of getting your email through, even though you might have some wording that would send up some red flags. I use the word email marketing in my newsletter, and that happens to send out a red flag to Spam Assassin and other word-based filters.

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

America Online has fantastically sophisticated spam filters. 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.

Interview with Debbie Weil, Wordbiz founder and online marketing expert Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

One, as you mentioned, are all the spam filters that are making it more difficult to deliver these email newsletters because they get trapped and caught up and siphoned off into junk folders. The second is simply the sheer number of e-newsletters, or e-zines as some people call them. Basically everyone has an e-zine, so it's very hard to rise above the din to get yours noticed. So I think what's going to happen is that only the ones that are good are going to survive. There's also the publishing end.

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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.