Devil Works

It’s been a bit over a week since I diverted all my email to gmail, I’m still getting a few spams in my inbox each day, but nothing like the volume I had to deal with before.

I did however notice a few false positives in the spam box. Most of them were from marketing mailing lists I’d subscribed to which can quite often have the characteristics of spam so I don’t blame gmail too much.

There’s a few easy fixes to stop them from being marked as spam in the future.

The first is to add the from address to your contact list, you can either do this manually, or when you get an email that is spam you can click on the little down arrow at the right of the email frame and click “add email@email.com to contact list”

Or if your in your spam folder, just mark the email with a tick and click the “not spam” button at the top or bottom of the list.

Plan C is as easy as sending a blank email to whichever address you want to receive the email from. Gmail will automatically place it in your contact list and it will be allowed through in future

I just came across an interesting read at Gigaom hypothosising how Google are working towards becoming a default advertising agency in all forms of media.

Robert Young thinks that the big G is working towards a concept where someone can sit at there desk and buy all the advertising in all the markets that they want.

It’s not a bad theory, check out the full article here.

I’ve had websites online since somewhere around 1999. In the good old days people didn’t think twice about putting their email address on there site and mine was online for quite a while.

The unfortunate thing about this is that spammers use a spider to travel the web and pick up email addresses. One of my accounts averages about 250 emails a day, and about 245 of those are spam.

I’ve tried a couple of different spam filters with varying levels of success. Mailwasher Pro was okay for a while. I liked the fact that I could check the sender and header before deleting the emails off the server. But after a while it lost it’s effectiveness to the point where it was only catching around 20% of the spam I was receiving.

I also tried SpamAssasin, this was much more effective. I’d say it was catching 99% of the spam I was getting. Unfortunately it was marking as spam quite a few emails that were actually important. ie email from my webhosting provider, paypal and the worst of all the registries where I buy my domains. This created a minor disaster when I lost a couple of domains because I never recieved the expiry notice. Though I should say that if I was a slight bit organised then I wouldnt have needed to get the expiry reminder. I tried adding certain domains to the whitelist but I’m not a mind reader and couldn’t be certain where these emails were coming from.

For a while now I’ve been using a gmail account and slowly updating my email addresses at various places to us that account. The spam filter at gmail is spectacularly good and I’m loving it, however there are some services I use that will not accept registration from free email account providers.

So I’ve just started my fourth effort at filtering spam. What I’m now doing is forwarding one of my main email accounts through to my gmail account. This was pretty easy to do through the Cpanel interface that my web host provides.

Continue Reading »

Work on my retirement project has been slowed lately.

I’ve been busy with lots of different things and I’m probably going to be like that right up until Christmas (when I have about six weeks away from my day job)

So far I have

1 site fully effective (ie all text link ads sold)

1 site needs a new template then I will submit it to TLA

2 sites needing a few more posts and backlinks before I can submit them to TLA

94 more sites that I need to create

From that you can see it’s going to take me quite a while, but I’m not in it for the fast buck and I’ve set myself some rewards for achieving milestones.

My first one is that when my income hit’s $500 a month I can take an extra four weeks annual leave via a payroll deduction.

When it hit’s $5000 a month consistently for six months I can take a year off my day job.

I need to think of some more rewards in between $500 and $5000 to motivate myself, but I’m thinking some new toys and probably a little bit of travel wouldn’t go astray either.

I’ve just spent the morning reading about pay pay per click arbitrage. I used to do this years ago when Adwords first came out. I’d buy clicks at 5 cents each and send them to a landing page with an affiliate offer paying $1.00 per confirmed email address. For the first few months I was spending 30 cents to make $1.00, which is a great return on investment.

Eventually the market got a little saturated and the return dropped to the stage it wasn’t worth my effort in monitoring it so I dropped it like a lead balloon. In hindsight I should have explored some different avenues and tested some different affiliate programs, but hindsight is a wonderful thing.

I tried PPC arbitrage again about 18 months ago, and the volumes I was getting on my handful of test sites didn’t make it worthwhile. But with all the reading I’ve done today I’m starting to think I’ll try it again with a few variations and see what happens.

The worse thing that could happen is I waste a couple of days and turn back to my retirement project.