The Cyber Magic of the Whitelist by Niall Roche
(c) Niall Roche - All Rights Reserved, http://www.spam-site.com 

Before we start getting deep into the meat of this article it's important to explain some standard terminology to make sure the rest of this article makes sense.

• An IP address is a number which identifies your location on the Internet.
• A blacklist is a list of IP addresses which your antispam software uses to block incoming spam.
• A whitelist is the exact opposite of a blacklist. 

A whitelist is a predefined list of IP addresses that are allowed to send email to and receive email from each other. Blacklists exclude known and suspected spammers. Whitelists can be used to exclude everyone except known IP addresses. Think of it like this. A whitelist is a like having a phonebook which is owned by a small group of people who only wish to speak directly to each other. They don't want just anybody ringing them. Not only that but the entire group need to approve new phone numbers before they appear in this exclusive phonebook.  

To send email to a whitelist you must be approved by the owner of the whitelist. This is a lot like the double optin systems used by legitimate ezines and mailing list owners. Whitelists are the nightclub bouncers of the virtual world - if you ain't on the list you ain't getting in. Simple but very effective.  

A real world example of a whitelist would be if two companies wanted to exchange email only with each other. These companies could implement a whitelist that contained the IP address for just the two email servers that want to send email to each other. That would mean that any email coming from an IP address not on the whitelist would be returned to sender. For companies they can ensure that employees are only dealing with work related email and not chatting with their friends.

The benefits of whitelists are many but proper management of the whitelists is equally important. Misuse of whitelists will only lead to more headaches for everyone involved with missing email, irate customers and IT departments doing overtime just being the tip of the iceberg.

http://www.spam-site.com reviews and tests spam filtering software for the business and end user. Niall Roche is the content author and owner of spam-site.com

Email spam is one of the most insidious side effects of the Internet revolution and has only gotten worse over time. If you are sick of dealing with unsolicited junk mail clogging your email account, follow these steps and apply some common sense and you can help slow the flood of spam down to just a trickle.

Whether you get 3 to 4 a day or 30 to 40, sorting through and deleting unsolicited emails can become a gigantic waste of time and energy - not to mention an affront to morals and family values. But don't think for a second that you need to put up with thousands of junk emails clogging your inbox.

If you have a business website, do not put an email address on your website. Instead, you might want to use a form so that your email address is hidden. However, some spammers use special software that looks at the HTML code hidden in the form to steal your email address, so using a form by itself is not always a total solution. Better yet, use a free form processor so that your email address is never even in the HTML coding on your pages. These are available online and can be found with a search.

If you do not have a business website and are getting bombarded in your personal email account, the following tips will serve both you and business users of email.

Never reply to spam and ask to be unsubscribed. It is a scam. When you unsubscribe it tells them that your email address is accurate, which just keeps you on the list. Note: many legitimate emails newsletters and mailing lists use automated unsubscribe links at the bottom of their emails, and you can use these to get off of mailing lists. Just make sure you know the real from the scam.

Use anti-spam software on your own PC to filter spam as it comes into your email system. You still receive the spam, but it gets filtered to a junk mail or bulk mail folder and segregates the spam from the legitimate email. Most anti-spam filters need to be trained to identify real mail or spam mail, so you will have to occasionally tell the filter that something is not spam, so it is not inadvertently put into the junk mail folder. Many of these anti-spam filters work on the principle of white lists and black lists. White lists are legitimate email addresses that you want to receive email from, and black lists are spammer email addresses that you do not want to receive email from. Learn how to train your anti-spam software and it will work wonders for you.

You can actually filter out offensive emails by a single word. This prevents many offensive adult related emails from reaching the eyes of your children and you!

Check to see if your Internet service provider or hosting company has anti-spam technology in place to catch spam before it even hits your Inbox. Be careful, though, because sometimes these filters are over-zealous, and you have to train it to accept emails from mailing lists that you have subscribed to.

Be crafty when filling out forms that ask for your e-mail address. Many web forms ask only for your name and email address. Put in a series of letters such as "Swseqw" for your name. Then set up a filter so emails from that newsletter or form will arrive in a separate folder if the email contains that fake name. If that e-mail turns out to be spam, set your mail program to delete all e-mails that come in with the fake name.

Complain to the sender's Internet service provider. Most providers want to stop spam more than you do. Again, make sure to include a copy of the message and header information and state that you're complaining about spam and the provider's lack of email security.

Finally, if spam is really bad, create a new personal email address for yourself, tell everyone about the new address. Send them several reminders that you are changing email addresses then delete the old personal email address. This may seem a little drastic, but if you receive 200 spam emails a day, it might be time to take this final step to eradicate it.

Get educated about how to battle spam and you can win the war. You are the first line of defense. Be careful who you give your email address to as they may sell it or rent it to people you do not want emailing you. This alone will reduce the number of spam emails you need to deal with.

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Email marketing software success hinges on the quality of you contact list. However, based on the email marketing software industry, your contacts will begin to drop off approximately three months after they initially opted in to your emails. I've mentioned in previous articles that a drop off should be expected, but there are ways to ensure that this drop off is greatly reduced, therefore making certain that the volume of your quality contacts is much greater. Here are four strategies to help you accomplish this using email marketing software.

"Preferred Customer" Offers:

As a retailer, using incentives can attract subscribers to continue their interest in your emails and services. Providing a simple promotion or discount for subscribers that haven't opened recently can reactivate a dormant user. In addition, you can send these kinds of offers to in-active users so that they update their contact information and preferences etc. This will help gather information on their continuing needs as a customer, as well as give you current contact information.

Send Out a Questionnaire:

The best way to discover why a customer hasn't been opening your emails is to ask them. Using email marketing software you can create a survey (that is quick and easy to fill out) so that in-actives can provide you with feedback. This is valuable information on things to avoid, but more importantly will tell you EXACTLY what particular users need from you so that you maintain them as active contacts. The survey will have questions relevant to your services, but be sure to also include things like a "preferred kind of message" section, or "best time to contact by email" section and of course a "comments and suggestions" section.

Take a Closer Look at Your Contacts:

Often times you'll notice that there are chunks of subscribers not responding to your emails, that all have similarities. Through these similarities you might be able to determine how to get through to those groups. You might find there is a section of your subscribers that are all in a particular demographic that you haven't been targeting in your email marketing software campaigns: young men, older women, single parents, or people in a different time zone, etc. By taking a closer look at your contacts you might get a lightning bolt idea as to why they have not previously responded and can easily remedy it so that your email marketing software yields even better results.

Testing/Mix Things Up a Little:

There is no harm in spending a little time testing-out different ways of sending to determine if it can attract a few more in-actives to the "good side". If you've always sent out email on the same day or time of day, try a few varied distribution times; see if it produces a different response. You can also change how often you're sending your emails. If you're accustomed to sending once a month, you may want to try sending twice a month, or once every two months. Also, try creating different content. In your analysis of you contacts if you've noticed a trend among in-actives, consider packaging the content differently for this group. You can also mess around with the format of your email marketing software campaigns. Start testing the differences between text versions vs. more dynamic looking campaigns.

Another important factor is you subject line. Sometimes all it takes to attract a subscriber back to the active list is changing the subject line. A subscriber might not open the email because the subject line is the same or similar to previous messages sent. For these subscribers the assumption is that if the subject line is the same or similar, so is the content. Testing out different methods of sending out campaigns will activate the pulses on some of your more zombie-like subscribers, but will also give you valuable information on what their wants and needs are. Successful email marketing software users are spending time on the maintenance of their contact lists; it's time to take full advantage of your email marketing software service by making that extra effort to ensure your contacts are still interested.

Bio (HTML): Rudy Barell is a Senior Business Development Executive with Elite Email, the #1 email marketing software used by businesses around the globe. Experience how easy it is to build your mailing list, create eye-catching emails and track your success using detailed reports with the complete email marketing. Try it free!