Focus On: Spam

When eBay's CEO Meg Whitman sends you a personal letter, it's only polite to respond... especially when it's about one of her pet crusades: Net Neutrality. Unfortunately, I discovered that her mail server could send mail, but appeared to be incapable of accepting replies. "Must be a DNS goof-up," thought I. So I posted my personal reply right here. Please don't read it if you are not Meg Whitman. It's personal.

A powerful emarketing tool combines eyeball motion studies with heatmapping display to help sellers bump sales. Unfortunately, when the conclusions derived from email heatmaps are liberally applied, phishers and other evil-doers benefit from the camouflage required to do evil properly. Email Battles tells you how to undo the evil, whether intentional or otherwise.

Most folks don't know that the zombie capital of the world isn't China or the USA. It's the European Union, by a long shot. The secret has been kept by well-meaning reporters who are living in the past, preserving each European state as an individual unit, as opposed to the EU as a full-fledged competitor on par with China and the US. Sometimes, it seems, the EU is treated like Rodney Dangerfield. It can't get any respect... even from its very best friends.

The admins at Microsoft IT make their anti-spam strategy brutally clear: They depend, first and foremost, on the anti-spam technique most riddled with inaccuracies, failures and outright corruption: blocklisting. Email Battles compares Microsoft's first-contact blocklisting technique with first-contact deferral. While both methods get you to the same net delivery rate, one is far more likely to deliver the mail you want.

These days, it seems everybody complains about spammers, but few have noticed how key players allow spammers to ply their trade. Email Battles takes you on safari, tracking a big one, then shows you how a well-known and respected registrar makes the tracks vanish. Think about that next time you hear ICANN-types whine about the impossibility of stopping spam. You're either part of the solution, or part of the problem.