Radiant Core: spam tag http://www.radiantcore.com/ All of the Radiant Core posts tagged with spam. en-ca Copyright 2006, Radiant Core Inc. All rights reserved. webmaster@radiantcore.com webmaster@radiantcore.com <![CDATA[Last Mile to the Inbox]]> Jay Goldman <info@radiantcore.com> http://www.radiantcore.com/blog/archives/10/08/2007/lastmiletotheinbox http://www.radiantcore.com/blog/archives/10/08/2007/lastmiletotheinbox http://www.radiantcore.com/blog/archives/10/08/2007/lastmiletotheinbox#comments ThinData.com, a leading provider of email services, have posted a whitepaper called The Marketer's Guide to Successful Email Delivery. You'll have to fill in a quick form to register to receive it, after which an email will magically wing its way into your inbox which contains a top secret download link. It seems like an excessive number of steps to take, but its well worth it if you do any email-based marketing and would like to take some precautions to make sure people are reading your stuff. Among other things, it covers the five Challenges to Successful Delivery, along with five Best Practices to negate them:

  1. Making Sure Email Can Be Authenticated
  2. Maintaing a Good Email Reputation
  3. Preventing Being Labelled as a Spammer by Recipients
  4. Preventing Being Labelled as a Spammer by Third Parties
  5. Configuring Email Servers to Meet Industry Standards
Highly recommended light summer reading - get to it!
]]> Marketing Fri, 10 Aug 2007 08:30:00 GMT <![CDATA[Spamming the Zeitgeist]]> Jay Goldman <info@radiantcore.com> http://www.radiantcore.com/blog/archives/13/06/2006/spammingthezeitgeist http://www.radiantcore.com/blog/archives/13/06/2006/spammingthezeitgeist http://www.radiantcore.com/blog/archives/13/06/2006/spammingthezeitgeist#comments three spam emails a minute. I'll repeat that, just for emphasis: three spams a minute.

I've got a pretty good network of filters in place that mean I only ever see about five or six a day in my inbox, and I have a special folder in Mail that has unread messages which have a high likelihood but not 100% certainty of being spam, which will collect about 50 messages a day. I usually give them a quick subject line scan before I do a select-all delete and I noticed an interesting thing as I read through this afternoon.

Spams tend to come in a couple of varieties. You've got your porn, your offers of sexual performance aids, your pharmaceutical sales entreaties, and your scammers phishing for passwords and personal information. I also get a lot of emails offering me some hot new product for free if I'd only go and fill in a form that gives them my firstborn child, a pint of blood, and the balance of my bank account. Those aren't interesting in and of themselves - unless you happen to have an extra child that you're looking to get rid of - but what is interesting is that the spammers are pretty good at picking the products they offer.
zeit·geist | Pronunciation:  'tsIt-"gIst, 'zIt  |  Function: noun | Etymology: German, from Zeit (time) + Geist (spirit) | Date: 1884 | Meaning: the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era

So I started thinking: what if I setup an email address and got it signed up to as much spam as possible, then had a script check for product and celebrity names in each message. A running tally of each mention, plotted against time, might give you a really interesting look at the pop culture zeitgeist from the same period. Different email addresses (e.g.:  Hotmail in the US, Canada, China, etc.) would likely give you a sense of regional variations on popularity. It would be a little like Google's Zeitgeist reports or the recent Google Trends, but less searchy and more spammy. Someone want to tackle this? I've got plenty of source material.
]]> Tech Geekery Tue, 13 Jun 2006 22:18:00 GMT