Neil Shearing’s Internet Marketing Strategies

Hey, I’m getting a tad frustrated with spam.

I know that I hardly ever see a piece of spam in my Google Mail inbox… they do a great job of filtering it out.

So why do I see so much spam in my regular POP box (my @scamfreezone.com mailbox)?

Well, it’s because I’ve had some of the “@scamfreezone.com” email addresses for a long time and they’ve probably been sold around the world ten times by spammers.

So, I’ve decided to use a “p2p” anti-spam system against the spam arriving in my inbox… I’ve downloaded the free (trial) plugin for Outlook from Cloudmark. The plugin monitors arriving email and chucks it into a spam folder if it matches the anti-spam criteria. Cloudmark uses all the feedback from its thousands of user reports to determing what’s spam and what’s not (a so-called peer-to-peer or p2p system). Presumably, with everyone reporting spam, it quickly gets identified and then blocked so that other users don’t see it. At any time you can check your spam folder for false positives, but I don’t expect to see very many of those.

I once launched an anti-spam software solution… spamblitzer. It didn’t do very well because we couldn’t get past the horrendous complexity of multiple pop boxes, html emails, filters and so on. It was just a logistical nightmare.

Hopefully Cloudmark does a better job and I’ll see less spam in my regular inbox.

I actually read about one marketer who’s switching all his email to go through his Gmail account… that’s another potential solution I guess, if Cloudmark doesn’t help.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Current posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.