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My friend Valleyken posted a message to his members about
Internet Marketing..The Hidden Obstacles/Emails Leads of
which he gave me permission to post it here on my Blog.
This is the second article he sent about an event in progress.
This should provide a warning to  every Internet Marketer to
be particularly careful but even so there are still no
guarantees

* WARNING
Many online marketers have their own website, and (wrongly)
think they are doing a good job at it. But running an online
business is not as easy as you might think, as I will
demonstrate with this (real-life) example.

* The problem:
I have been receiving tons of spam emails in my ISP mailbox
the last few days. They are all coming from the same source.
I am talking about 100 emails a day (on top of the usual spam
from other sources). You can imagine I would like to stop
receiving those spam emails, right?

* The source:
I tracked down the source of the spam to http://mofo.com
This site seems to belong to an international lawyer firm.
According to their “About the firm” page, they have more than
1000 lawyers in 17 offices around the world.

* Some considerations:
- Since they are a law firm, you would expect them to take
spam complaints from their domain seriously.
- You would probably also expect them to respond to spam
complaints promptly. But I received no response to my emails
so far.

- No doubt they have more money and manpower at their disposal
than the usual “mom&pop” 1-person online-marketing sites.
Those lawyers of course don’t manage the site themselves …
they likely have a complete IT team to take care of their
site: managing the site, answering support questions,
handling complaints, … all things that the little guys like
us have to manage ourselves to run our online marketing
business.

* Their mistake:
The cause of the spam is the “email this page” link that is
on many pages of their website. Anybody can send out spam
emails through that form, to any email address, with any
content that they like in the email body.

* The solution:
The simple solution to their spamming problem, is to take this
“tell-a-friend” script off their site (or at least protect
it against automated submissions by spam bots).

* The pitfalls:
- They have several email addresses on their website,
supposed to help people with questions about their site or
company. I sent 2 emails, explaining about the spam problem
with their site, but received no response so far. But here’s
the big problem …

1) Having their email addresses on a public website, means that
they receive no doubt a lot of spam from spam bots in those
mailboxes.There is a good chance they never even noticed my
complaint emails between all the spam they receive.

2) Possibly, because of excessive spam in their support mailboxes
they have a strict spam filter on their mailbox. And that only
increases the chance that my complaint also gets blocked as spam.

3) I’m trying to let them know about the problem, so that they can
fix it. Luckily they have a phone number on their site too, so I will
probably try calling them on the phone to get this resolved. But
most people who complain about spam, wouldn’t do that effort.
They wouldn’t even know that the company never received their
spam complaint because of the above reasons. So many people
report spam to the hosting company, which would result in their
website being taken offline and result in loss of profits for the
company  and a lot of trouble to get their site back online and to
have the tell-a-friend script removed from their site.

* My advice:
1) That is why I highly recommend every website owner to have a
contact form, instead of posting your email address publicly. It
will help you to keep your email address off of the spam lists of
“email harvesters” and to protect you again an ever-increasing
amount of spam in your support mailboxes. A contact form is
also much more reliable than giving people an email address to
contact you. If your website has no contact form, you’re in for
trouble !!

2) Never ever put a “tell-a-friend” script on your website. It’s
a big security risk, allowing people to spam through your website.
And when people start complaining about the spam, there is a
very big chance that your website will be closed down
permanently (or worse, if somebody decides to sue you for
spamming).

3) Many people are fed up with spam, and try to take action against
it. Unfortunately, most people who file spam complaints, have no
clue about how to track down the real source of the spam, and
report it to all the wrong places.

- They report it to spam@uce.gov. This is the FTC (government)
service for filing spam complaints. Little use, since they won’t
take action to stop the spam. They just file it as proof of guilt,
in case somebody is prepared to take the complaint to court.

- They complain to the hosting company of the link that is being
advertised in the spam emails. Congratulations, you just screwed
a mom and pop-type website owner, just like you and me out of
business. The marketing site would be taken offline by their
hosting company, but it would not stop the source of the spam
(mofo.com). This is similar to how my own server was taken down
a while ago, for no valid reason !

- The only effective way to stop the spam in this case, is to
report the problem to the hosting company of mofo.com. But like
I said, most people who file spam complaints, have no idea that
this site is the real source of the spam (the mail server that is
sending out the spam emails). And while I might have to do this,
I think it’s only normal that I try to contact the people from the
mofo.com site first to inform them about the problem. They are
probably not aware that their site is being abuse by spammers. Of
course, if they don’t respond or don’t cooperate to fix the problem
I’ll have no other way than reporting them to their hosting company.

What I’m trying to say is … be very careful if you want to file a
spam complaint, because you might be screwing a lot of innocent
people (big time), while not even fixing the real problem if you
don’t really know what you are doing.

4) As a website owner, make sure that you know about email !!

5) Realize that running a website is normally a task to be done by
a complete team of experts. Even then, there are a lot of problems
as you can see from this mofo.com example. The little people like
you and me have to be very careful to stay out of trouble.

6) Realize that communication is a very big problem in online
business. Emails get blocked … very often, and it can lead to a
lot of frustration if support questions don’t get answered. The
problem is not always with the website owner trying to give you a
hard time. Most often the problem is a combination of the website
owner (not being able to provide solutions for all the obstacles
in online business), and the customers (not realizing that their
support questions might never even reach the website owner).

7) Don’t expect your hosting company to warn you about these
issues. They don’t bother with how you run your site. They just
take you offline in case of complaints. And while they might do
a good job at providing you with the webspace, don’t expect that
they’re experts on all these obstacles. In case of spam complaints,
it’s up to the hosting client (you and me) to figure out exactly
what happened and how to fix it. And a lot of innocent people can
get screwed in the process, due to widespread ignorance about
how email works.

Sincerely, Valleyken

———————————————-

Scary stuff isn’t it. I have been with Valleyken using all his
products for quite sometime and it is top stuff. He has even
written a Book on the subject of Emails called
Email Delivery Secret and the information He provides in there
is outstanding. He really is an expert on the subject, and if
someone spamming frightens him than we really have something
to be concerned about. What ever you do, watch out for others
sending spam or even mailing from or through your websites and
blogs. Thank you for reading this and thank you Valleyken for
the Timely advice and allowing me to use your articles for my
readers benefit.

Ray

Support

http://helpdesk.adboardz.com

Filed under: Business Building, List Building