If you hadn’t guessed, this isn’t a posting on how to actually make any money, but more my personal rantings on the topic.

Here we go…

If you were honestly working 4 hours a week and making money as an Internet marketing entrepreneur then why would you be diluting your market by giving your ‘secrets’ away?

The truth being that “make money” schemes and lazy work ethics are super hot right now, especially while the economy is as unstable as it is and it’s quite easy to convince a few hundred suckers to follow you down this road.

The reason SPAM continues to be a problem is because it works. Regardless of whether it ends up in our inbox or Twitter client you ultimately wish for certain destruction to fall upon these evil-doers… I do.

I absolutely have no doubt that one or even possibly two people have actually made $300 a day on Twitter and have successfully migrated their lifestyle to the ominous 4-hour work week. Great, good for you… well, good for the both of you.

The cheesy videos, the followers whose bio includes “Internet marketer”, the direct messages about 4-hour work… you get the point. It’s all a bit silly and I am hoping this is just one giant phase that will disappear like Tupperware parties. Oh — they didn’t disappear. Crap.

Why is it working? Simple, someone is clicking on their stinking’ links!

How do we stop it / them? Stop clicking the pathetic make $$$ tweet links, their Google Analytics will begin to suffer and they’ll eventually go back to their day job and give up on Twitter dreams and this lazy lifestyle concept that seems to have taken over our generation.

Long blog short. If we all ignore them, they’ll go away. But it takes all of us to do it. Just curious clicking is enough to bump their tracking statistics enough to keep them salivating.

~moses

I was once told quite some time ago by a close colleague who happens to be a very knowledgeable and successful Internet marketing guru, that the truth behind SPAM, is that it works and works quite well.

If SPAM didn’t work, they would stop. It’s that simple.

But unfortunately for every unsolicited email that gets whacked by our SPAM filters or obliterated with a stroke of the delete key, someone, somewhere is reading, believing, clicking and ultimately confirming to SPAMMERS that the old adage about a sucker being born every minute is true.

I can assure all of you that I am not the sucker. However, if it happens to be you… knock it off. You are are really frustrating us non-suckers!

I have a few dozen email addresses that are in continuous use and of course SPAM is a constant issue with many of them. My combat strategy has always been a two-prong defense and includes both server and client side vectors.

On the server, I use SpamAssassin fully configured with appropriate thresholds and scoring for my tastes and a whole handful of black list services implemented.

On the client side, I use Mail (default Mail application in OS X) with SpamSieve which is primary a bayesian algorithm based implementation. http://c-command.com/spamsieve/

The combination of these two work rather well for me and on any given day, SpamAssassin is working overtime with an average of 3,000 to 4,000 emails cleaned and whatever slips by is picked up by SpamSieve, which averages just over 400 SPAM messages a day.

Unfortunately I didn’t capture a screenshot of my SpamSieve statistics before the recent reload of this machine earlier this month, it would have been very interesting to see SPAM statistics over an 18 month time period.

This is my current statistics from SpamSieve for the period from 05/12/09 to 05/26/09

It has always been at 99% or better and makes an excellent backup to catch what sneaks through the server.

~moses