“Objective: To make Ronald Scelson realise that he is pissing on the rest of us from a great height (by somehow rubbing his nose in it and thereby showing him the aura of his wees). Who is Ronald Scelson? Ronald Scelson claims to be the most prolific spammer on the planet.”

“This report — available as a PDF download — describes a simple method that will allow any user to cope with increasing amounts of incoming e-mail. Some of the ideas come from author Mark Hurst’s free Good Experience newsletter, which reaches 50,000 subscribers worldwide… Anyone who uses e-mail should read this report. Anyone who manages e-mail users, or works in I.T., should read it twice.”

“[email marketing] testing should serve the purpose of increasing your response or conversion rates or helping you reduce costs. But also important are continuing to learn about your audience members and trying to figure out if they are really opening and responding to your messages. Below are some things to think about when testing.”

“When a recipient marks a message as spam, the program automatically assigns it a small signature based on its content and forwards this to one of numerous distributed servers on the internet. These signatures are then automatically downloaded by other members of the network and used to block other copies of the same message.”

“Much to the chagrin of Hormel Foods, maker of the canned ‘Shoulder Pork and hAM’ luncheon meat, the term ’spam’ has today come to mean network abuse, particularly junk E-mail and massive junk postings to USENET. How did the term get this meaning? I went on a mission of etymological research…”

“I have written about the problem of spam in the past, most notably about how some Web sites and content management systems do not do an adequate job of protecting their users’ email addresses from spam harvesting robots (spambots). There are also people out there who just want to cause trouble by using your email address as the return address for thousands of pieces of spam, as Dave Winer has recently found out…”

“These are some of the interesting mailing lists for IA’s. If you know of others please contribute. Feel free to add comments of your own to the list.”

Jump down to Dan’s E-Mail Rules: “Public relations in the technology business must be an incredibly difficult job. There are demanding clients on one side and impatient journalists on the other. In between, a PR person has to maintain a sense of humor. I get an enormous amount of queries and pitches from public-relations people. Many ignore my long-stated preferences…”

“So great was the response to our recent appeal for the world’s longest email disclaimer that we have decided to celebrate the best of the bunch in six categories. The organisations responsible will be awarded a coveted Vulture Central ‘Dafta’ for their contribution to international timewasting: *Longest Disclaimer; Most Incomprehensible Disclaimer; *Most PC Disclaimer; *Best Bi-lingual Disclaimer; *Best Spoof Disclaimer; *Special Award for Best WWW Disclaimer.”

Tom Van Vleck: “This note describes my knowledge of the history of electronic mail and instant messaging. I don’t really like to use the term ‘e-mail’ or ‘email.’ I usually just call it ‘mail,’ and it’s clear by context whether I mean electronic mail or paper mail.” Submitted as a counterpoint to The First E-Mail Message.

“The Internet’s phone book is up for sale — and though the listings may represent a treasure trove for marketers, the move also risks a serious privacy backlash. At issue are millions of entries in the domain-name database operated by the Network Solutions unit of VeriSign Inc., Mountain View, Calif. It is, essentially, the master address book for the Internet. Since the dawn of commerce on the Web, companies that want their own dot-com addresses have registered with Network Solutions.”

“email is very important to a lot of people and companies. However, very little usability research has been done on email, specifically email subject lines. This article is a summary of a research report written by WebWord on the topic and contains several results. The basic finding from the research is that effective email subject lines are very short, very meaningful, and personal.”

“Now you can stop junk e-mail, a.k.a. spam, from cluttering up your inbox. SpamMotel’s unique patent-pending technology lets you know exactly where the sender got your e-mail address, and lets you block all e-mail from that sender with just a click of your mouse. It also blocks e-mail from anyone the sender gave, or more likely sold, your e-mail address to.”

“Check your email from the web, from any computer, anywhere in the world. No need to register!” They also offer Mail2WAP, Mail2PDA and News2Web, which is great since MailStart changed their services.

“Sometime in late 1971, a computer engineer named Ray Tomlinson sent the first e-mail message. ‘I sent a number of test messages to myself from one machine to the other,’ he recalls now. ‘The test messages were entirely forgettable… Most likely the first message was QWERTYIOP or something similar.’”