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Until a few days ago, I forwarded all my @scamfreezone.com email to my Gmail account and downloaded the filtered emails.

Unfortunately, Gmail got swamped. I had 1.27 MILLION emails in the spam folder. That’s an average of 42,365 hitting the account every day! The spams were taking up 5.7 GB of webspace.

But the real problem was that spams were slipping through the Gmail filters, and I was having to download them and delete them. I use Windows Mail on my desktop, and found its anti-spam “rules” to be clunky and difficult to use.

So I set up a new system, which I’m very happy with.

I created a Spam Arrest account and let it check the Gmail account. Spam Arrest checks incoming email against my whitelist of senders. Any sender who isn’t on my list gets sent a “challenge” email asking them to verify that they’re human.

I now download my emails from the Spam Arrest account, and I only get emails from people on my whitelist or people who’ve verified themselves.

For the next few days, I’m checking the Spam Arrest account via a web-browser, just to make sure it’s getting things right. So far it is… the stats are 190 emails processed, of which 115 were spam and 75 were good emails. So that’s already saved me from downloading and filtering the 115 from the 75.

(you may be thinking why didn’t I just miss out the Gmail account and set up Spam Arrest to get emails from the scamfreezone server. The answer is that I don’t think Spam Arrest would be happy sending out 42,365 challenge emails each day just for me! I also think Gmail’s spam filters are quite good, so it seems best to leave that working and have Spam Arrest work on the Gmail-filtered emails)

What do you think? Have you got a great anti-spam system? Could you improve on mine? Leave a comment below…

I did. Down from 150ish to 76. I noticed that Ed Dale is down from 7,000+ to under 5,000. Joel Comm was almost at 2,500 and is now at under 2,000.

Searching Twitter found these recent comments…

“i went from 71 to 27 followers and im only following 17 now instead of like 30 somthn”

“I guess I’ve been a little boring recently. My followers has just plunged from 44 to 35! ”

“I lost three quarters of my followers/following. Added a few back. Will now wait and hope twitter will resolve problem. ”

“I shed more than 350 followers, including some real people.”

Twitter officially say,

“We’re still in the process of recovering from the missing follower/following problem that occurred earlier today. Over the next several hours, you may see inaccurate counts or timeline inconsistencies as the correct data is propagated to all parts of the system.

One thing to note: Even after this recovery is complete, your counts may appear lower than previously. In almost all cases, this is not due to missing data. The counts we display on your profile page are not always up-to-date. For example, when we remove spammers from the system (which we’ve been doing a lot lately), the follower counts are not updated in real-time.

As we push out the changes to fix this afternoon’s problem, the counts will be updated to reflect the latest numbers.”

You can click on the graphic to download the PDF, or click here.

I seem to remember, a long time ago, marketers tried to get affiliates to rebrand and redistribute PDF files. The actual rebranding process was kind-of clunky and it didn’t seem to work very well. As a marketing tactic, it seemed to die out… but… I just rebranded Paul’s report with what seemed like one click. It was impressive, but not really surprising because Paul’s team of programmers make coding tough projects look easy… just look at the features they’ve packed into XSitePro!

With regards to the book itself, which will be available on Amazon, Joel said he interviewed 28 big names in Internet marketing, especially those whom he considered had the most impact on the Internet marketing niche and were instrumental in its development (think John Reese and his “million dollar day” in 2004). Joel said that there has never been a biography of the development of the Internet marketing niche… and “Click Here To Order” fills that hole in the market.

With regards to the marketing, Joel said that there would be a blog competition where blog visitors could leave comments answering the two questions, “Why would you want to win a copy of Click Here To Order?”, and “How would a day with Joel and his team in Loveland, Colorado change your life?” The winners of the competition will be announced on July 31st, the day before the book launch. The runners-up prizes will be two 30-minute phone consultations with Joel, and the grand prize will be an all-expenses paid trip to Loveland, Colorado to spend the day with Joel and his team seeing how they run their business.

Pretty cool.

I hope you enjoyed that “breaking news”.

Why?

Because I haven’t seen it.

I suggest you read a review by someone who has reviewed the product such as Alice’s PDF or Lynn’s blog post. Andy Jenkins also reviewed TS 2.0 in a looong audio podcast.

I’ve no doubt Traffic Secrets 2.0 will be a great product… but because I haven’t seen it, I’m not promoting it.

It’s supposed to read, “Google Goes Flipping Crazy”… because their Google Trends was hijacked. Read the details at TechCrunch.

(I must stop getting sidetracked by “neato” things like upside-down and back to front text!)

He went on a missionary trip to Belize, which I blogged about here.

He did a write-up of the trip at his blog, here… but look at the picture of Eric!

Who are you, and what have you done with Eric?

See for yourself…

Crikey, Phil… that’s about one a month!

But, as I said at his blog, it’s quality, not quantity, that counts.

I’m happy to always recommend Phil’s newsletters and products because of the quality.

If only certain marketers would send out just one email per month instead of one per day… :p

Originally “nofollow” was introduced to combat blog spam, but smart webmasters like Leslie Rhode and Michael Campbell had been using javascript combinations before nofollow was invented to create links that search engine’s couldn’t follow.

Why?

Simply to prevent PageRank going to “useless” pages like their “privacy policy” or their “disclaimer” or their “terms of service”. After all, if you’re building a website about “cellphone batteries”, you don’t want your “legaleze” pages ranking well because they have nothing to do with what your website content is about… so if you can distribute Pagerank more effectively to your content pages, you’ll have a better chance of getting them to rank highly in the search engines. (of course, humans can still click on the links to the legaleze pages)

The argument against using “nofollow” for the purpose of managing Pagerank burst out into the open again recently when Adam Audette said, “Don’t waste time worrying about sculpting internal links.”

I’m sorry, but I beg to disagree. It’s very quick and easy to “nofollow” links to your privacy pages, TOS and disclaimer… and if all of your site’s pages point to those “legaleze” pages, by adding nofollow to the links you’ll save a lot of wasted Pagerank. Often, because of the number of links, those pages can be some of the highest ranking pages on a website, which is totally pointless for the webmaster and Google.

What do you think? Do you use “nofollow”?