Remember the frenzy in January, 2003 when the National Do Not Call Registry promised to block unwanted phone solicitors from calling us at home? Your phone-free dinners may come to an end soon.
- Stop Telemarketing Calls - Unless you opt-out again before December 1st, you’ll have to put up with 31 days of telesales calls while your new request goes active. Telesales companies are gearing up to make your life a living hell for those 31 days.
- Stop eMail Spam - Stopping it at the source is better than blocking it at your computer. I don’t have big hopes on this one.
- Stop Junk Mail - Trees are disappearing by the millions and showing up in our mailboxes in the form of junk mail catalogs. I carefully remove the label from soup cans and put it in the paper recycle box before smashing the can for its recycle box. A years worth of can labels don’t weigh as much as 1-day’s worth of holiday catalogs.
Today, I spent 20 minutes and $2.64 (4 postage stamps and $1 Visa charge) to eliminate part of this avalanche of unwanted marketing junk. And I did it at a new one-stop website: ProQuo.com. Here are the 16 bad actors responsible for a ton of cr*p that I hope I stopped:
Stop Request Received For Abacus (Division of Epsilon)
Stop Request Received For Acxiom
Stop Request Received For Aristotle
Stop Request Received For Choicepoint
Stop Request Received For KnowledgeBase Marketing
Stop Request Received For Publishers Clearing House
Stop Request Received For ShopWise
Stop Request Received For ValPak
Stop Request Was Confirmed For Credit Card, Mortgage & Insurance Offers
Stop Request Was Confirmed For Criss+Cross Directory
Stop Request Was Confirmed For Direct Marketing Association (DMA)
Stop Request Was Confirmed For Money Mailer
Stop Request Was Confirmed For National Do Not Call Registry
Stop Request Was Confirmed For PennySaver
Stop Request Was Confirmed For Switchboard.com
Stop Request Was Confirmed For WhitePages.com
Four of these global-warming marketing mills required me to print out a letter and mail a signed copy. The Credit Card, Mortgage & Insurance Offers service (OptOutPrescreen.com) asked for my Social Security Number (I gave it) and charged me a dollar on my credit card so I won’t get offers for more credit cards.
The National Do Not Call Registry required an email confirmation but was really quick (30 seconds total). Here’s the success confirmation screen:
Now to sit and wait for the storm to pass. You might want to give ProQuo.com a visit.
October 25th, 2007 by Day Tooley
Posted in General, eMail | Enter a comment »
How nice. An old friend has sent me an email greeting card. Just click here …
Yikes! These buggers carry more of a wallop than a Howler message at Hogwarts!
According to Postini (the anti-spam/anti-virus application we use and provide at EasyStreet) the 125 million infected email messages intercepted during the first week in July was the most active week in more than 2 years.
But wait. A new virus storm has been ravaging the Internet since July 16th that has spewed more than half a billion virus-infected messages. This is 14 times larger than any attack in the past two years.
If you receive one of these loaded email messages and click the link, a generic software downloader is secretly installed that allows hackers to download more malware to your computer.
Be careful out there. You-Know-Who is sending attachments to you. Better yet, get behind some good anti-spam/anti-virus protection. Even the best protection is not 100% effective in this dynamic chess game between the spammers and the protectors.
If you have a personal experience to share, I would appreciate your comments.
August 8th, 2007 by Day Tooley
Posted in Most Popular, eMail | 3 Comments »
~~~~~~~ Related Posts
- No Related Posts
It seems that a tsunami of spam has been surging through the Internet recently. According to Postini, a firm that filters email, spam rates increased 59% to over 5.3 billion messages per week. The total message volumes rose 54% to over 6.6 billion. This happened in just the past 8 weeks ending October 30, 2006. Yikes!
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| See expanded details updated daily. Update 12/6/06: Excellent New York Times article helps explain how spam is overwhelming spam filtering methods. These figures align with the EasyStreet 80/20 rule where we identify 80% of all incoming email as spam. Small businesses receive more than their share. Here are some things you can do to reach the high ground, safe from the spam tsunami. |
November 3rd, 2006 by Day Tooley
Posted in eMail | 1 Comment »
Of all the services on the Internet, eMail remains the most dominant. We now can instantly be in touch with our business colleagues, clients and prospects. (I am being continually 'touched' throughout the day, often by strangers.)
Why, then, is our high-tech communication not more effective?
Michael Morris and Jeff Lowenstein are among the scholars studying the benefits and dangers of eMail and other computer-based interactions. They have identified three major problems:
- eMail lacks cues like facial expression and tone of voice. That makes it difficult for recipients to decode meaning well.
- The prospect of instantaneous communication creates an urgency that pressures e-mailers to think and write quickly, which can lead to carelessness.
- The inability to develop personal rapport over e-mail makes relationships fragile in the face of conflict.
Their findings are summarized in a comparison between eMail and phone communications:
| How well do we communicate? |
| Frequency that … |
eMail |
Phone |
| Communicator believes he is clearly communicating |
78% |
78% |
| Receiver believes he is correctly interpreting |
89% |
91% |
| Receiver correctly interprets message |
56% |
73% |
From an article in the Christian Science Monitor, Professor Morris found that negotiators exchange more than three times the information in face-to-face interactions as they do via eMail. Though Morris and his colleagues concluded that e-mail lets negotiators make "more complex, multiple-issue offers," they ultimately built less rapport, thereby increasing tensions and lowering the average economic value of the agreements.
So before sending that proposal, how about making a phone call?
May 17th, 2006 by Day Tooley
Posted in Collaboration, eMail | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
How much does your email cost?
It turns out that the biggest “cost” is time. More specifically, time wasted on . . .
- Unnecessary email (spam)
- Effects of virus infections
- Loss of efficiency by not having access to your email from where you are
Small business has been battling #1 and #2 for some time. Affordable tools only can go so far. The more effective business-class anti-spam/anti-virus solutions are clearly out of reach for smaller companies.
For example, if you have 12 employees with business email, your 12 employees are wasting 160 hours each year dealing with unwanted email. That alone translates into $3,200 in annual productivity costs. (Compute your actual lost-time cost with this tool.)
#3 has been addressed by large companies who can afford to buy and support in-house mail servers. Access to office information from anywhere is having a profound effect on improving efficiency in large companies. Telecommuting, laptops, PDAs and cell phones all can share contact lists, documents, calendars and email in real time.
So what is the total cost of your current email?
You will likely discover that your email costs more than EasyStreet’s new Hosted Exchange/Outlook 2003 Email service officially launched today. If you have under 100 employees, you can now afford these business-class assets without even trying to approximate them with the higher-cost Microsoft Small Business Server located at your office.
March 15th, 2006 by Day Tooley
Posted in @ EasyStreet, eMail | Enter a comment »
