Mobilize Mail Opinion

The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act comes into force on 5 September 2007 which is about 6 months away.

My opinion is that most businesses will leave the task of dealing with compliance until the last minute not realising that cleaning up existing mail lists is not an easy task which you can book a Sunday afternoon to complete.

We have already started the process of helping our clients clean up their existing mailing lists which also includes the day-to-day emails which is where the bulk of the work will be I believe. A number of questions have been raised by Mobilize Mail staff and our clients. The answers are not provided in the Act so we and our business partners have worked towards finding the answers ourselves.

Helen in her latest article points out an important part of the Act in that you must have consent from your existing subscribers. We have a few clients that thought sending subscribers emails with an unsubscribe link a number of times constitutes consent but it does not unless there is some additional criteria that meets one of 3 forms of consent.

We have a number of strategies to help businesses identify areas within their email communication that could be an issue for compliance and if you are interested in Mobilize Mail helping you please contact us.

Click here to read Helen’s latest article.

Anti Spam Compliance Solutions For You & Your Business

To see how we can help you and your business comply with the NZ Anti-SPAM Act click here

New Source: press-releases.techwhack.com

In what is believed to be the highest damages award an individual has received in the UK and thought to be the first case in Scotland, an Edinburgh man has successfully claimed damages from a sender of unsolicited commercial email.

Gordon Dick was granted decree in Edinburgh Sheriff Court against Transcom Internet Services Ltd (Transcom) of Henley-on-Thames. The judgement, in January, awarded Mr Dick damages and, unusually for a small claim, lifted the normal £75 cap on expenses the defender was ordered to pay.

Read more…

11:02:29 – So, what did you do at the weekend�
11:02:54 – Ahh yeah, just the ususal. . .
11:03:39 – Did you hook up with your one from last week?
11:04:22 – Nah didn’t see them about

And so on. . . .

chatSPAM � email conversations that create an unnecessary load on the server, waste your time and eat up productivity quicker than a hungry T-Rex on a chicken farm.

I’m guilty of it I admit. Very guilty. As are you. I worked with one guy many years ago who would send email for the sake of it, just for a laugh with a splash of boredom. It was great receiving his messages but from a business point of view very wasteful. One more memorable messages arrived on a day the office building got struck by lightning, as the IT manager walked through the office and told us all to save what we were doing as there had been “a strike”, within 2 minutes I’d received an email with a MS Clipart picture of a F16 superimposed on a city outline. Lightning strike, air strike. . . .go figure.

chatSPAM is becoming increasingly prevalent in this day and age. We’re now seeing more and more emailed conversations being sent on and legal cases coming through because of the incriminating evidence trail that you cant deny “was taken the wrong way”. Workers are forgetting that everything they send is being monitored and stored, and used against them in a court of law. Hey, why not? If I had a guy working for me spent 30% of his day emailing for the sake of it, he’d be seriously disciplined and monitored for a period of time after that.

Some people may say it does no harm, but aside from the productivity, theres the load on the servers. There are also legal issues that if a conversation gets outside of the company it could destroy them. Just because the company equipment was used. While some may argue that it is upto the company to monitor resource usage, there is also a great deal of responsibility on the worker to use the equipment responsibly.

Why do we feel the need to converse through email? Does it give us something to hide behind? Can we be a different persona by using email? The above four lines of conversation can be played out in under a minute. Why not go stand by the watercooler and talk? Get up and wander across the office to discuss something. Its good stress relief too. If we all end up playing out our working lives through email conversations, how we interact with people will change drastically, we will become more reclusive and the office affair will be no more.

We need more social intercourse people!

Spudmasher (Mobilize Mail Client)

A wolf cannot fit into sheeps clothing on its own it has to get help from somewhere. SPAMing is much the same. A lot of companies now offer a semi decent level of SPAM filtration. This helps Joe User sleep better at night knowing he wont wake to find 50 kajillion messages in his inbox. However, the problems start to arise when Joe unwittingly helps the SPAMmers.

How does Joe help the SPAMmers? One of the main methods is through forwarding on messages. You may have read my previous article on a petition that was being circulated. People were asked to forward on the petition to everyone in their address book, which a lot of people did – even to those overseas – this was a bit odd especially as the petition was only relevant to NZ law.

So what’s wrong with that? You may ask. Well, when you forward a message your email address is usually displayed at the top of the message. Everyone you send the message using TO or CC, will most probably have their email address displayed also. Is this a problem? No – because you trust everyone on your list not to SPAM you. They are all in your trusted senders list, so you can only accept mail from them.

The message you have just forwarded gets forwarded again. And again. And again. Who has the message now? Well, say you send it to 10 people. 7 of those send it on to another 10 each. Now 70 people have your email address. 70% of those people send it on to another 10 people. Another 49 people have your email address. The list grows.

The message finally reaches Jack SPAMmer – they look at the list and can literally follow the list of people to see who started it. He can see that Joe sent the message to Mary who sent it onto Peter who sent it onto John who sent it to Jack. Jack now sends a disguised email from John to Peter. From Peter to Mary. From Mary to Joe. The email contains a  malicious attachment. Jack didn’t send it onto John because John is dating his sister and he lives in fear of his sister.

So even though Joe, Mary, Peter and John have strict filtering rules to only accept messages from persons in their address book, the fact that email can be disguised as coming from someone else very easily, promotes the importance of not sharing others email addresses. Would you like it if a stranger told everyone your phone number? Or told others where you lived? If you want your privacy, then respect others too.

Incidents like this happen thousands of times a day all over the world – the easiest way of cutting back on the email address sharing is by BCCing your recipients. Send the message to yourself and BCC everyone else on it. You may realise how many messages you actually send by sending it to yourself (this will be discussed in a future article – “chatSPAM”).

Spudmasher (Mobilize Mail Client)

Okay, watch out for this one.

Spammers are now creating legitimate looking newsletters with links to their products carefully hidden in the content. You may think you are reading about discount fares from a reputable airline or the latest news on your favorite sports team but you may end up clicking a link for body enhancing pills or even worse.

Click here to read more…

Personally I find my email address abused most by “Social SPAMmers” – these are the people who I have the biggest grievance against – including my wife. These people send me emailed petitions, jokes, “good luck” messages and pitiful stories about sick puppies with eight legs who’s life can be saved only through global awareness.

Its doesn’t take long for chain emails to circle the globe these days. About 10 years ago, some high school students found it took around seven days. Now its been done in well under three. Only a few weeks back I received one of these “joke emails” by a guy (Peter!) sitting next to me in the office, two days later the same email was sent to me by another guy (Joe) sitting the other side of me. Both had different trails, but I’m sure the missing link was in Wellington somewhere. Probably the guy at the other side of the room.

So anyway, I received an online petition from my wife. She sent it to my “official” email address I give out to only personally trusted sources. She also CC’d everyone in her address book. “What!” I screamed, “what have you done?”. It wasn’t that bad in the end but I had to do her bidding for a month for the shouting.

Cut to the chase, these emails annoy the be-jaysus out of me. The email in question started an online petition in the name of a political party. The 100th person had to forward the email onto the party’s contact address. After some investigation, turns out the instigator was in  the marketing business. Was this a clever ploy? I cant be sure. Especially as there was no request to CC him on it.

There are two ways of looking at this. Firstly he may be hoping that the email will make its way back to him. He’s now got names, email, and home addresses. He’s also promoting his website – I know I gave him a few “hits” investigating him online. Did he do it on purpose? maybe – maybe not. Either way, his brand has now reached well over 100 people without breaking any laws, even the new NZ anti-spamming legislation. The second viewpoint is a little darker and involves the politicians. As the political party is set to receive a copy when the names reach 100, the party now has 100 potential voters who share their viewpoint. They have their names, email and home addresses. Guess who’s getting a knock on the door, and a lot of junk mail in their letterbox in the future.

In my opinion, this could be perceived by some as amateur spam. Nothing scientific in it. There is no guarantee that the instigator will get the message back or that he/she was seeking promotion of their business by adding their domain within the email.

Is spamming an intent to destroy or annoy? I feel spammers fit into three categories. Those who go out to intentionally destroy, those who spam or general annoyance (and personal interest) and those who simply don’t understand what they exposed themselves to by forwarding on that message to seven friends because that puppy sounded so damn helpless.

The experiment about seeing how quickly an email can make its way round the world is an interesting one – and worth trying. It would provide good stats on what a well worded and well structured email is capable of and how far it can go. It doesn’t have to have fancy code nor viruses attached. Just like dropping a message in a bottle in the ocean. It may come back, but most likely will wash up in your co-workers inbox which will warrant a slap round the back of the head.

SPAMing isn’t just restricted to emails either – how many people wasted their phone credit or jacked up their phone bill just because they got a text message saying if they forwarded the message to 10 friends they would get $20 credit. That brought a major NZ mobile network to its knees not so long ago.

Companies are spending thousands of dollars fighting this. People are spending thousands of dollars trying to stop it. Professional spammers are spending precious social intercourse time in front of PC’s trying to get around the companies spam rules. Vicious circle. As my father always said – Education is the key.

Anyway, for those out there who try the experiment out of sending a global boomerang-email, let me know. Send me your email address and I’ll add you to my SPAMster blacklist.

Spudmasher (Mobilize Mail Client)