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We all get hundreds of spam emails e

Guest post by: Marc Holt

Article Overview: One of the way spammers find email addresses is to harvest them from websites. If there is an email address anywhere in your website an email harvesting program will find it.

We all get hundreds of spam emails e

One of the ways spammers find email addresses is to harvest them from websites. If there is an email address anywhere in your website an email harvesting program will find it. I experimented with a couple of harvesters the other day and the results were amazing. I set the program to start at just one of my own websites. Six hours later, it had collected more than 2,000 email addresses by following links from one website to the next.

That got me thinking about ways to use this against them, so I did some more research and found a great Free program called WPOISON. I have installed it on two of my websites and it is now trapping email harvesting programs into an endless loop that fills up the spammer's server with an endless numbers of fake email addresses.

Wpoison captures the email harvesting program and sends it to a fake page that looks like it contains some juicy email addresses. Every time the harvester saves an email, it is sent back to the same page to collect another one repeatedly. The harvester can no longer get out of the page or do the job it was designed for, and the spammer's hard disk fills up with junk email addresses. It's beautiful!

Best of all, Wpoison will not interfere with legitimate web page crawlers like search engine robots. As long as the crawler obeys the basic rules all search engine robots do it will work perfectly. But harvesters ignore those rules so that they can do their nasty work. And that's why it is so easy to trap and maim them. Don't you just love it when the baddies get caught by their own trickery? By being stupid, brutish, and un-careful, spammers play right into our hands!

Go to www.holtww.com, or www.holt-realty.com and look down the bottom of any page. Click on the 'Protected by Wpoison' logo and then download the program from the Wpoison website.

It's very easy to install.

FREE WINDOWS KILLER APPS

How often have you wished there was an easier, better way to work? Surely there must be a 'killer application' that would perform miracles?

Of course, the 'killer app' we would like to see would do different things for different people: An impossible task.

Instead, I have been collecting and testing a variety of FREE programs that perform specific chores. You can find them all on our website for download at http://holtww.com/tools.shtml. These are my favorites, and I will be adding more as I find them.

1. Password Generator & Secure Storage: Are you tired of forgetting your passwords? Worried that your passwords can be easily cracked? 'KeePass' is the ideal tool to save and generate all your passwords.
2. Instant PDF Creator: Creating a PDF file to send documents is fast and easy with this neat little PDF creator tool. Just start the program, add the document to the print queue and Save. Instant PDF file!
3. PDF Reader: Here's a great PDF file reader with a simple, clean, easy to use interface. Open any PDF file and view. Includes some very neat features.
4. A Better Notepad: Hands up those who are tired of using NOTEPAD, the severely crippled text editor supplied with Windows. Download and try Notepad2. This is what MS should be giving us!
5. Open Source Peer-2-Peer File Sharing: Frostwire is an open source Peer-2-Peer download file sharing program. Based on the popular Limewire nag ware program, Frostwire is faster, and doesn't nag you all the time to pay to use it. Just fire it up and start searching for files to download.
6. Spyware Cleaner: Spyware has become a real problem, but you can get rid of these pesky critters easily with Flobo Anti-spyware. Often, spyware will slow down your computer as it starts sending information back to the scum who have installed it. Run Flobo just before you close down for the day, or whenever you think your computer may be infected. Flobo scans your hard disk and automatically deletes all spyware.
7. Clear Your Memory: Windows loves to eat up your memory, and that slows you down or even hangs your computer. Here's a simple way to clear the memory and get back up to speed. Right click on your Desktop, select NEW, and then select SHORTCUT. Copy the line of code below into the field, and click on NEXT:

%windir%system32rundll32.exe %windir%system32advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks

If you get an error message, take out the %windir% command until after you have finished. Then replace it again. Right click on the icon on your desktop when you have finished creating it, and click on 'Pin to Start Menu'. Then it will be easily available whenever things slow down.

SEO

A client came to order a website the other day and he asked if we could design it so that it gets listed high in the search engines. I told him that good website design incorporates many things, including ensuring that the search engines will 'love' the site, and that's how we design.

Then he pointed to the bar of text at the top of our www.holtww.com website and asked why it is there. I told him we put the text there so that it is the first thing you see when you open our website so that you have something to read while the rest of the page is loading (remember the 4-second rule?). He said he didn't want the same thing, but could we design so that we get the same results? You bet! Any good webmaster will do not only what the client wants, but also what is good for the client's business. Often, the client isn't even aware of how we have helped him, but they love the results. And that's why people hire us all the time.

LOOKING FOR BUSINESS IN CHINA?

One of the best kept secrets, although not for long, for finding new business in China is the phenomenally successful Baidu.com search engine. It is listed on NASDAQ, and it is China's leading search engine, even beating Google in many areas. What I found amazing is that despite being available only in Chinese, it is actually owned by an American company. The world is getting smaller every day, isn't it?

Here's why you should consider Baidu to reach the China market. Baidu is the preferred Internet search engine among China's richest entrepreneurs, with Google coming in second place, according to a recent report by the Hurun market survey. On a regional basis, Baidu was ranked first in seven of 10 cities and provinces surveyed by the magazine. Google finished first in three of these regions: Shanghai, Guangdong province, and Jiangsu province, according to the survey.

So, if you are trying to break into the China market, advertising, and searching on Baidu.com will pay big dividends.

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Related Forum Posts
Re: What i hate... - It does suck when people don't reply to emails. However, you need to take into consideration that some of them probably get hundreds of emails per day that they would have to reply to if they replied to them all. And with all the spam these days it's easy for a legitimate email to get overlooked or lost. I'm sure more often than not they are just not replying because they don't want to but there are some good reasons that might be the case.
Re: What i hate... - [quote="Trent Brownrigg":3srgv506]It does suck when people don't reply to emails. However, you need to take into consideration that some of them probably get hundreds of emails per day that they would have to reply to if they replied to them all. And with all the spam these days it's easy for a legitimate email to get overlooked or lost. I'm sure more often than not they are just not replying because they don't want to but there are some good reasons that might be the case.[/quote:3srgv506] I agree with Trent on this point. Also I think a lot of emails are sent from auto responders and they are general ones that go out to everyone one on the list, so many of these don't require answers. It's true that I also don't open emails if they come from someone I don't know. Who know what kind of virus can be in there. MichelleJ
Re: When is your interest peaked by unsolicited mail? - The worth spammers are like the one I got today. They have no shame, they will subscribe to your newsletter and use it to reply and spam you. The subject line is usually "RE:your subject", I recognize my emails, and this just make me so angry, because I am opening these emails, maybe one of my readers need my help, and this "lady" today, saying thank you for a valuable info, and then writing more and more and some more on her business, and how she made money, when we know she didn't, otherwise why is she sending me spam? 4 emails like this, the same text, from the same person, replying to 4 emails sent by my autoresponder. I have other things to do with my time, like sleeping!
Re: How to Manage Your Emails - I get at least 100 emails in my main account every day. And at least another 100 total in my other accounts. Gmail is very good at sorting them. Not a lot of spam makes it to my inbox and rarely does a legit email get sent to the spam box.
Don't they know there are spammers out there? - Just a rant.... I have a spam filter on my email, such that every day probably about 20 or more emails a day end up in my Bulk folder and I don't even see them. But I still see dozens of spam messages a day in my Inbox, and I recognize them by their titles, if they just say, "Hello," or "Hi" or some other generic title, I know it's spam and I just delete it without even opening it - as you must do. Today I got an email from someone, and the title was "wff". Just that. Not even capital letters. Normally I would have just deleted it without reading it, but fortunately I saw the name of the author, and it was a name I recognized, not a friend but an acquaintance - someone who works for the Williamsburg Film Festival. And the title "wff" was of course Williamsburg Film Festival. And I wonder how many businesses send out emails to potential customers with generic subject lines so that their stuff gets sent to the Trash file without even being looked at.


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