spam

The BBC wrote an article on spam which you can read here.

Some key takeaways - according to Spamhaus more than 90% of email is spam BT, Bulldog, Wanadoo and Tiscali are failing to tackle the problem of botnets (spam sent from ordinary household computers that have been hijacked by hackers).

I’m not sure whether it is an omission or whether the 2nd and 3rd largest ISPs (Virgin Media and Carphone Warehouse) in the UK are doing a better job of dealing with this.

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There has been a bunch of rumours that Plaxo will get bought by Google or Facebook. But I think Microsoft would be a much better fit? Plaxo has great integration with Microsoft Outlook - which fits well with Microsoft’s connected applications strategy, it has a large base of registered users and could add to Microsoft’s online portfolio. It would also allow for Outlook to become more “socially” aware and take advantage of the email social network. Of course Yahoo has a social network so maybe this is only a go-er if the Yahoo deal falls through.

I do not see any positives though for Facebook buying it or for that matter Google really. What am I missing?

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It has been common knowledge among email marketers that the “Friendly from name” is more important than the subject line. People scan the friendly from name to decide which emails are from people they recognise. If it is from someone they know then they are less likely to treat it as spam.

Roll on my Gmail junk folder. It was getting big so I thought I’d take a quick scan before deleting them. Of course with the emails being in the spam folder, I had only the from name and the subject line to go on - the images themselves are obscured. So I see “River Island” and “M&S” and thought I might want to see their emails in the future and click the “not spam” button. No sooner do I look at them with images do I know immediately it is spam and Google got it right.

Darn! I should have expanded the friendly from name so I could see the actual from address. It was obvious this was not from the sender it purported to be but this is hidden by default in the Google Apps version of Gmail. This doesnt seem to be the case in my standard gmail account.

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A rapid fire post on the past week having been away from it all in Atlanta.

FAST is being bought by Microsoft - Dylan Fuller, formerly of FAST has a good run down on it. I do think it is interesting that Microsoft bought it rather than Google - it’s an obvious fit for Microsoft in the enterprise search space where it is strong but I thought Google wanted more of this space - is it that they think they can do it themselves? or does it not fit with their “everything in the cloud” philosophy?

Xobni launched its beta. Scott Voigt saved me the trouble of installing it right now by giving me a preview. It looks nice enough and gives you some interesting information about your inbox but it doesn’t aid your productivity. It will be interesting to see if this can evolve into a “Email 2.0″ plugin for Outlook, creating a social network through which it prioritises your email. Very early days right now though.

CES happened, the only highlights I heard about were Yahoo Life (integration of the various Yahoo services to give a better user experience - more in a later post); great looking TVs (very thin, bigger..) and Bill Gate’s disappointing keynote looking more at what we know Microsoft is doing rather than anything new. Still it was his last one..

Finally.. Newsgator went free. Finally. The question is whether it is too little too late for them.

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Microsoft have released a plugin to sync both your contacts and email between Windows Live Mail and Outlook instead of/as well as using the web interface. This used to be paid for but is now free (you still have to pay if you want to sync calendars as well..). For those who find the web interface of Windows Live slowwwwww, this is great Maybe I’ll switch back from gmail now..

download it here

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