[Hi-LaL]

Effectively Monitor The Progress of Your Email Communications!

By: Rito Salomone, Sat Sep 30th, 2006

The rise of Internet accessibility to the masses has revolutionized the way people work, play and communicate. Email communication has become the most popular means of information exchange in business and personal use. Personal computers, notebook, hand held devices and cellular telephones all allow you to communicate via email.

Email has rapidly grown to rival the telephone as the centerpiece of effective communication. Although email tends to be less personal than a voice conversation, it has become a preferred means of exchanging data such as quotations, invoices, literature, references, contact information, pictures, URLs, files and many other online resources. This phenomenon has given rise to the misuse and malicious use of email.

Many of us spend countless hours weeding through Spam messages. Those with tight email filters wake up in a cold sweat wondering if that one important message got sent to the Spam folder. Even though some governments have taken steps to curb Spam, most people spend about 20 minutes a day deleting messages offering better mortgage rates, free vacations or cheap Viagra. It is no wonder that many businesses are turning to email tracking services to ensure that their valuable information is being delivered to the right person and read.

I am sure you would not be surprised that not every email that you send is received or read by the intended recipient. There are many reasons for these lost communication nuggets including Spam filtering, overloaded inbox, forwarding rules or simple avoidance. The solution is email tracking!

What is email tracking?

Email tracking is a means of ensuring that your email is matched with its intended recipient. It utilizes secure, digitally time-stamped certificates to reveal the exact time and date that your e-mail was received - and read.

Additional notification options may include how long it was read for, who read it, the approximate physical location of the reader, whether or not your email was forwarded to someone else, what kind of computer was used to read it, what file formats the reader can accept (eg. PDF, MS Word, Excel), whether or not your email has been published on the Internet and countless other tracking mechanisms.

Why track your email?

Many businesses find it imperative to determine if prospective customers receive and read their messages from email promotions, request for quotations or product information. Email tracking is the most effective way of identifying whether the campaign was effective. Sales managers often wonder if their sales representatives are being thorough in their email communication. Email tracking provides a tool for accountability. Special reports can identify number of messages sent and amount of time spent by the recipient reading the message.
What if you sent a quotation with the wrong numbers? If the email has not been read, you may even be able to retract or delete the email. Some tracking services even allow you to create self-destruct or email that can be retracted after a period of time. If the email is never opened or assumed to be lost, you could retract the old message and/or send a new message.

Tagging messages and watching their progress adds to secure communications. Many medical, law enforcement and legal firms utilize this service to enhance security of sensitive information. Email tracking helps ensure information is read by the right person!

Some companies may opt to set up their own servers in order to keep control internally and others may use an online service. Both options are available from a number of providers. I recently visitedMailTracking to take a test drive. It was very simple to use this service.

Do you want to try email tracking yourself?

Simply get a free account at MailTracking (or another free email tracking competitor) and start sending your emails with an added extension .mailtracking.com. Therefore, if you want to send a tracked message to jdoe@hotmail.com, you simply add the extension as follows jdoe@hotmail.com.mailtracking.com. As the email message travels across the world wide web, you will get notification of its various stages.

About the author:
Rito Salomone is the president of Resource Software International Ltd. (RSI). He has 17 years experience in the field of communication management solutions.

Direct Link: EmailTracking

10 Fun Ways to Get Young Children to Eat Healthier

By: Angela Russ, Thu Sep 28th, 2006

Parents and caregivers have the sole responsibility to introduce healthy food choices to young children. Children learn from the meals you offer, the way you serve food, the way you shop, and the examples you set. They develop habits early that, once learned, can last a lifetime, so it’s never too early to make a change. It’s important to take every opportunity to promote a healthy active lifestyle. Try these ten creative ways to get young children to eat healthier.

1. Prepare Healthy Meals Together

Engaging children in the preparation of kid-friendly healthy dishes is so fun and so very messy, but children are more likely to eat something that they have helped to prepare. So, bring out those bowls, spoons and cups. While kids are helping, it is a good time to introduce portions, simple fractions and units of measure.
When you are finished preparing, show children how to set the table. Don’t forget to dine together. Children who eat meals with their families tend to have better diets, not just because meals are planned, but because of the positive examples that are set at the table.

2. Get Creative

Make silly food faces out of fresh fruit and vegetable slices, and come up with amusing, silly names for the healthy foods you prepare. Celery and raisins become “ants on a log,” peanut butter and pretzels can be “mud on a stick,” and spaghetti with tomato sauce can turn into “wiggly worms.”
The golden rule is “distraction.” The apple wedge is a boat, and their mouth is a river. Peas are made out of green. You can become a consummate actor or a verbal Picasso to get them to taste something new.

3. Pack Snacks Together

Children can also benefit from packing snacks for the day, or packing for a picnic. When planning a long-term getaway, encourage them to help with bagging individual portions of fruits, chilled veggies, cheese sticks, crackers, trail mix, water, 100% juice boxes, and other good choices. These are the images they will carry with them throughout their day.

4. Take Children Shopping

Young kids love to play grown-up. On a real excursion to the grocery store, allow the children to pick a new fruit or vegetable to try at home. Let them weigh their choice, bag it, and put it on the conveyor belt. Once home, let them help you present it to the family. Try to avoid flying through each aisle like a secret agent on a mission. Slow down and turn shopping into a learning experience.

5. Plan a Family Taste Test

Slice a variety of apples such as, Fuji, Granny Smith, Red Delicious, and McIntosh. Set out a variety of breads such as Sourdough, Rye, Potato, Whole Wheat, Pita, and Tortilla. After each taste test, compare the various textures and characteristics while you talk about your favorites.

6. Show Kids How to Grow Food

Many local growers are happy to share the farming experience with young children if you call ahead of time. Take a trip to your local farmer’s market where you will often find fun activities for kids.
Children are more likely to eat fruit or vegetables that they have grown and picked themselves. Use a planter, or assign a small piece of your yard to start your own private garden. You can begin with tomatoes and build from there.

7. Sing and Dance to Good Food Songs

Find songs with lyrics that promote healthy eating and an active lifestyle. If you can’t find music in your local retail store, there are some great offerings available for young children online. Music CDs like “Smart & Tasty, “Bon Appetite,” “Groovin’ Foods,” or “Smart Fruit & Veggie Songs,” can be found with a simple internet search.

8. Explore Healthy Foods Through Books

Find coloring books or read books that introduce fruits and vegetables as characters, or have interesting stories that revolve around healthy foods. Books such as “I Will Not Ever Eat a Tomato,” “Counting Pumpkins,” “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” “Food for Thought,” and “Eating the Alphabet: Fruits and Vegetables from A to Z” make for some great fun and educational reading.

9. Plan a Craft Activity

Let your child design something artistic such as a paper craft that can be displayed on the refrigerator, pasta art on a plate, or a personalized placemat that can be laminated for repeated use. Some web pages offer free downloadable or printable activities that engage children. Search for your favorites or visit 5aDay, Dole5aDay, and NutritionExplorations for some interesting offerings.

10. Play Fun Games That Involve Healthy Eating

Children who have fun with healthy foods are more likely to want to taste them. Instead of “Duck, Duck, Goose,” play “Grape, Grape, Juice.” Play target practice by tossing play foods into grocery paper bags. Let your children select from their play food and serve you a nutritious meal.

Play verbal “I spy a color” games and board games that promote healthy eating and educate young children about good food choices. The Produce for Better Health Foundation at 5aDay offers “The Fruit and Veggie Race” board game for all ages.

Empower your young children to be agents of change in and away from home. They will not only eat better, they will inspire others to do the same.

Direct Link: 10 Fun Ways to Get Young Children to Eat Healthier

How to Write an eBook

By: David A. Wells, Sat Sep 2nd, 2006

Before you begin writing, you should take some time to carefully consider what your product will be. Of course, it must be an information product, but that covers a lot of area...eBooks, newsletters, eZines, subscription sites etc...
If you're starting your first site I highly recommend you choose an eBook for your product. It's a much more finite thing than your other options - Far easier to manage.

So what do you write about?

You write about your topic in way that is useful, informative and actionable. Provide real information to your readers that they can put into action to their immediate benefit. Information that tells your prospects how to get something done.

If you're an expert on your topic then this should be easy. You already know what problems exist in your topic area and probably more than a few solutions to those problems.

If you still have a few things to learn about your topic, that's ok too. You have some research ahead of you. For me, the best way to do research is to read everything I can find about the subject and jot down important notes as I go.
Go back to your market research notes from the previous section. Re-visit each site and look carefully at what they're selling. This information is invaluable when deciding what you should sell.

Most people assume that because a product already exists in a niche that there isn't room for any other products. In fact, it's the exact opposite. A product selling successfully in a niche is the best indication possible that the niche is profitable and active.

Now, don't get me wrong. Don't go out and copy someone else's product. Use the ideas and principles behind the successful products in your niche to develop your own unique product concept.

Take your time revisiting your market research. Make sure you have a complete picture of the products and product concepts being offered in your market before you settle on what your product will be.

Look closely at the ads offering products in your topic market. What benefits do they promise? What is their unique selling proposition? How are they different from each other? What do they all have in common?

As you ask each of these questions also ask "How can I do it better and what can I do differently?" What can you offer your topic market that isn't being offered? How can you offer more value than your competitors?

Once you have an idea of your product concept, write it down. Then spend the next thirty minutes thinking about it and re-writing it. Add as much detail as possible while trying to make your concept as simple and straightforward as possible.

About the author: How to Use Simple Sales Sites to Create a Huge Passive Income Disarmingly simple internet marketing strategy that will show you in 10 easy steps how to create a series of internet income streams. Each is independent of the others and each will bring in a few hundred dollars every month on auto-pilot. Make as many as you like. www.3PageSite.com

Direct Link: How to Write an eBook

[Misafir]

By: Dejan Bizinger, Sun May 21st, 2006

Deliverability is today's biggest issue for every email marketer. Email marketers face deliverability problems because of email overload. Many people who spend much time online and that have businesses very much related to computers and Internet often get more than 100 emails per day. Usually, 8 out of 10 emails are considered as SPAM. Problem is that your email message, supposedly that you are legitimate marketer and have permission for contacting, can be flagged as SPAM. This can make harm to your business and reputation.

Here you can find some interesting facts about deliverability and SPAM:

Antispam.Yahoo

Using some Hosted ASP email marketing software you will loose money because of the fact that you will pay for every message sent and not for every message delivered. Beside that, you will loose money in lost sales. Using desktop email marketing software like GroupMail (http://www.group-mail.com) you will pay one-time-fee for software licence and not for number of messages delivered.
You can have deliverability issues because of anti-spam lists, because of ISP filters and because of corporate/user filters. So there are three hurdles you have to jump over to get your messages delivered. So, how can you improve your deliverability rates?

Subscriptions

The first necessary step in getting your email message delivered is that you have permission of your members to send them your messages. Never, and we mean never, put people on your list without their permission. We recommend you double opt-in method for getting new subscribers so that they have to confirm their request to be your subscribers. It is recommended to ask them to enter their work email instead of free email addresses. Some companies go that far that they don't allow subscribing if you use free email address. It is because of the fact that work email address is considered as more reliable and stable than a free email address.

Welcome message

So, after they confirmed their request you have to take the next step. You have to automatically send them your welcome message where you will give description of your company, email newsletter and list management info (information about subscribing, unsubscribing, digest mode, archives...).

In this welcome message it is very important not to forget two most important things. To tell them to put your From address in their Whitelist filtering rules to ensure that your message will arrive in to their inbox and not in their Bulk folder. And second very important thing, you should ask them to save your welcome message for future reference. Many people forget that they subscribed to certain email newsletter. Because of that they can accuse you for spamming and report you to your ISP or email marketing company.

Regulations, relations and reputations

You have to constantly have good relationship with major ISP in order to ensure good deliverability. ISP relation often can be a complex job so many email marketing software companies have special people assigned for this type of job. They have to actively watch news about ISP politics and to fulfil their request.
For example, some ISP won't deliver your message if your messages don't have a so called DomainKeys or Sender Policy Framework (SPF) key to ensure that the message really came from your domain name and to protect email sender identity. This prevents email spoofing. Some other companies won't deliver your messages if you are not compliant with Habeas Sender Warranty Email Header. The Habeas headers allow you to guarantee that the emails you are sending are not spam and bypass filter systems.

Speaking about DomainKeys, for example if you send your message from one Yahoo email address to another Yahoo email address the recipient will see this info below From name:

"Yahoo! DomainKeys has confirmed that this message was sent by yahoo.com."

You can have your own DomainKeys so that your recipients get similar message like above only with your domain name in it. Not only that it is recommended to have your own DomainKeys it is also very professional to see that your company is have one. It shows that email communication is very important for you.

For more information about those standards and regulations visit:

Antispam.Yahoo.DomainKeys
Wikipedia.SenderPolicyFramework
Habeas.com

You have to ask your email service provider what steps they take in order to ensure the maximum deliverability. If your email service provider is blacklisted your messages won't be delivered on many places. Also, you have to check whether your domain is blacklisted. You can use different services like DnsStuff.com, Spamhaus.org, Spamcop.net. Having a good reputation with major anti-spam lists and policies ensures that your messages won't be filtered.

List maintenance

You have to track which email addresses are undeliverable and if it repeats several times you have to remove those email address if your software won't do that for you. Also, if you don't use double opt-in method for getting subscribers it can happen that someone make a typo in entering their email addresses so instead of, for example, username@domain.com they enter username@domain in your subscription form. Email marketing software like GroupMail has add-on called Email Inspector which removes bad email addresses and can validate recipient addresses by format, using DNS lookup and full SMTP user account testing.

Content and consistence

"Content Is King!" - one of the best known rules on the Internet. In email marketing, it is not only important that you include quality content. It is also important that your message don't look too "spammy", that it isn't full of words used by spammers like: free, buy now, guaranteed, limited time offer...etc, thay you don't write words all in capitals. It is considered as SHOUTING! There are several useful tools that will check your content if it is considered as "spammy" before you send your message. One of those services is EzineCheck (http://www.ezinecheck.com).

Also, you have to follow one of the most important rules in email publishing and that is consistency. You have to choose your From field name and stick to it, you have to make your Subject line in that way that it clearly represents you, to choose one format and always use it.

For example, let's say you have a newsletter called Best Practices Guide. You can design your subject line this way:

[BPG] Article Title, Issue No., Date

This can be your template so it is more likely that your message won't be deleted by mistake. You can make your style even further. You can make a practice that your every article starts with number or question so this template can be:

[BPG] 7 Best Deliverability Tips, Issue No. 10, 10/10/2005 or [BPG] How To Get Your Emails Delivered, Issue No. 10, 10/10/2005.

We have said that you have to choose your From field name and stick to it. Beside that, your From email address is even more important. Many subscribers make filters based on From email address so if you change your email address it is more likely that your message won't be delivered or read. That's why your From email address has to be consistent.

About the author: Dejan Bizinger is a Contributing Editor for Infacta. Infacta is email messaging services company providing powerful, yet easy-to-use award-winning Group Mail, software for sending highly-personalized email messages and Group Metrics, software for email tracking. For more information visit: http://www.group-mail.com)0

Direct Link: Get Your Emails Delivered!

[Misafir]

By: Robin Dary, Thu Sep 21st, 2006

Do you get odd emails and wonder how they got your email address? Never been to a porn site and yet get porn emails? Do you get viagara emails? Or any medication emails at all? Home mortgage emails?

It seems like I get more junk and useless email from people I know than I do from spammers. Your friends and family have good intentions but there are some simple guidelines you can follow and protect yourself and your email account.
Here's some email guidelines:

Don't forward an email and leave all the email addresses it has been sent to showing. Why you might ask. There are programs out there that real spammers use to grab email addresses. When you forward (or even reply) with all the addresses showing you just gave spammers the opportunity to get all those email addresses. Imagine if the email went out to 10 people who sent it on to 10 people .....there's my email address and yours vunerable again and again.

If you want to send an email to a group even within your office send it to yourself and blind copy all the recipients.

Don't send every joke to everybody. Some people seem compelled to send every joke they get to every person in their address book. Don't waste my time only send me what yo uthink I might be interested in. If I miss out on a joke email I'm sure I will live.

Don't forward emails and consider that keeping in touch. I've had friends (notice past tense) that thought keeping in touch was forwarding an email. Nope, it's not. Once in a while send that person a note and see how they are doing.

Stop forwarding the "true good to be true" emails. Disney World and Pepsi will give you money to forward this to all your friends, Microsoft and AOL will send you money, send this to everybody in your address book and you will have good luck,...you get the idea. Spammers love this because these things make their way around the Internet quickly.

Stop sending the fake warning emails. "I'm a police offier and my wife is a nurse and I never thought anything bad would ever happen to our kids......blah, blah, blah, send to all the parents you know" or a "woman stops for gas and a guy jumps in her car blah, blah, blah,...send to all the women you know and all the men you know to send to all the women they know".

Be careful before you hit a "reply all" to an email. I've seen people get fired, lose friends or get in trouble for this one.

Email is a great medium and email marketing is fine. Let's just use it wisely folks.
About the author: Robin Dary is a marketing professional with online and offline marketing experience. Her current project is a brand new site, ParkerComputerGuy. Parker Computer Guy is a computer repair and consulting business in Parker, CO.

Direct Link: StopAnnoyingEmail

[Misafir]

By: Sean Proske, Sat Sep 9th, 2006

How Can I Stop Getting Spam? A Tutorial for Webmasters By Sean Proske mailto:sproske@thewebhostcompany.com

Are you getting too much spam? We all are, but if you're a webmaster the word spam takes on a whole new meaning.

It's not uncommon for the luckiest of email users to receive a dozen or so spam messages each day, while those of us who aren't so fortunate receive hundreds.
The casual home user tends to be more fortunate, so this article is devoted to those of us with one or more website because webmasters are getting hit by spam ... and hit hard.

The reason ... a website doesn't do you much good if you don't give potential customers a way to contact you, and that normally means posting an email address on your website, where it is vulnerable to email address harvesting tools used by spammers. Domain registration records are also a common source used by spammers.

In order to conduct business online you now need to sift through the endless barrage of offers for herbal viagra, pornography, pyramid schemes, and so on.
With such a large volume of spam to contend with, it's likely you've lost sales due to missing important emails that simply floated away in this sea of spam. And there's no way to really calculate the cost of that lost business. If you've missed email then how can you ever know how much business you've lost?

If you want to solve the problem, you need to be proactive because the sad reality is that if you do nothing, it will only get worse until finally it reaches the point where your email account has become totally and completely unmanageable. Fortunately there are a few options available to you.

-------------------------------------------------- Securing Your Domain Registration Against Spammers -----------------------------------------------

First let's address the whois database, which is a publicly accessible database in which your domain registration record is listed ... and that includes your email address. It's not uncommon now for people to be spammed at a brand new email address within hours of registering a new domain.

Go Daddy GoDaddy.com is a domain registrar that now offers private domain registrations. At the time of writing this article, they are the only registrar who currently offers this service. Hopefully in time, other registrars will pick up on this idea and offer the service too.

With a private domain registration, which costs only a few dollars more than a regular registration, your contact information including your email address will not be publicly accessible in the whois database.

That's guaranteed to cut down on spam quite significantly as this very important source of addresses that spammers use, will no longer provide your address to them.

If you don't wish to obtain a private domain registration, then there is another option that will be equally effective. Set up a new email address that you use only for the purpose of providing registration information for your domain name. You can easily scan email sent to that address for messages from your registrar, and delete the rest without having to read it.

-------------------------------------------------- Securing Your Website Against Spammers --------------------------------------------------

The other major source, and by far the biggest source of email addresses for spammers is of course the mailto links on your own website. Email address harvesting or extraction software as it's known is cheap, easy to use, and readily available ... and it's very effective. That means there are a lot of spammers out there with easy access to your email address.

Chances are hundreds or even thousands of spammers using such software have already harvested your address. And what can you do about this? You need to provide a way for your customers to reach you by email, or you'll lose business. There are steps you can take to prevent your email address from being harvested and used by spammers though, while still providing legitimate visitors to your site with a way to email you.

One solution is to make all the mailto links on your site point to a form instead, which will still provide a means for people to send you email. Provided you use a CGI script that doesn't require the address to be embedded within the form itself, you can shield your address from email address extractors.

If you don't want to require people to fill out a form to email you from your website, then you can get a little more creative. It is possible to put a mailto link on your site that when clicked will still launch the sender's email program, and start a new message with your address in the To field ... but without having to embed your email address in the mailto link where spam software can snatch it.

Click below to see an example of how it works.

http:/ hewebhostcompany.com/cgi-local/email.cgi

It looks like a normal URL, and there's clearly no email address anywhere in the link, but when clicked, instead of loading a web page in your browser as you may have expected, your email program opens up.

How's that possible you might ask? Simple. A little magic with CGI using Perl or PHP will do the trick. A free copy of a script that does this is bundled with Postmaster Pro, available at PostMasterPro.com which is discussed below.

-------------------------------------------------- What About Spammers Who Already Have My Address? --------------------------------------------------

So far we've discussed a few fairly simple techniques designed to prevent spammers from obtaining your email address in the first place. But, how do you deal with the spam you're already getting? Your address is already out there. The solution is to either block or filter.

For either, you'll need software. For blocking, I recommend Postmaster Pro. If you prefer to filter then Spam Assassin is highly recommended. Both run on the server, so there is no need to download spam before filtering it out. That's a huge time saver if you're not yet on a high-speed connection. It also makes it a bit less likely you'll end up downloading a virus since email from untrusted senders, i.e. spammers will be significantly reduced.

------------------------------------------------ Spam Blocking Software ------------------------------------------------

Postmaster Pro which is available at PostMasterPro.com takes a novel approach to blocking spam. It only allows email to be delivered after people who've sent you email have been placed on an approved sender list. But the interesting thing is that people who send you email can put themselves on your approved list. This is done simply by clicking a link in an email that automatically gets sent to them the first time they send email to you, which is perfect for those of us who don't know in advance whom we should put on the approved list, i.e. if you're running a business online. It also makes building and maintaining such a list very simple.

Given the fact that spammers normally use invalid return addresses, and those who do use valid return addresses seldom read email that's sent there, let alone respond to it (they receive thousands of failed delivery notifications, complaints, remove requests, and autoresponder messages every time they do a mailing) ... it's a very effective technique with no chance of blocking legitimate email, as is the case with filtering.

-------------------------------------------------- Spam Filtering Software --------------------------------------------------

For those who would prefer to filter ... Spam Assassin is perhaps the best option. It is available at SpamAssassin.org. Once you have Spam Assassin installed, it will provide you with very powerful and flexible filtering tools. Spam Assassin is a mature product, having been around for quite some time. If you're going to filter, Spam Assassin is about as good as it gets.

As with any filter though, you do run the risk of missing legitimate email from time to time. There really isn't a good way to tell how often this is happening unless you want to read all the email that gets filtered out, which negates the whole point of filtering. If you set your filters permissively enough though, you should be reasonably safe. For the first month or so after installing any filter, you should continue to read every single email in order to make sure it isn't set too restrictively to allow legitimate email through.

By using the techniques mentioned in this article, you can take back your mailbox, and dramatically reduce, if not eliminate spam.


-------------------------------------------------- Sean Proske is the CEO and founding partner of thewebhostcompany.com which has provided reliable and affordable hosting since 1996. Sedoparking.com - thewebhostcompany.com info. This website is for sale! mailto:info@thewebhostcompany.com -------------------------------------------------- © 2003 by Sean Proske

Direct Link: StopSpam

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