Aug 2007

Dear Client,

For those of you with business websites, we have been doing an excellent job lately of optimizing several of our clients’ sites for high rankings in the major search engines. Many are now on the first page, if not the first position, of search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN—and this is done without using click-through advertising. If this is something that could benefit your business, give us a call. We’ll be happy to give you the details on what we offer.

One question that comes up regularly is how spammers get your address, and another is why your email address is often the ‘from’ address when spam gets sent to you.

First, spammers have gone well beyond looking for email addresses on websites. They now employ virus writers who write viruses that infect peoples’ machines and then peruse their address book…and send the list to the spammer’s website. Very tacky, and very effective. Similar groups do the same thing but write viruses to look for financial information on your computer (eg, QuickBooks or Quicken files) and send it on. It really is important to get and maintain both anti-virus and anti-spyware programs to protect yourself against this type of intrusion.

The second question—how they can use your address as the from: address. That’s because when email was first thought up, no one ever imagined that anyone would lie about their email address. So no controls were ever put in to verify an address. As a result, just as someone you meet can lie about who they are and you can’t tell, neither can a mail server verify the from: address of an incoming email.

Since some mail servers may reject an email from a spammer, they will send it back to the from: address—and if that address points to you, it can still get delivered. And they get paid.

The good news is, there are some techniques becoming more accepted to block impersonation of others, so as more mail servers use these techniques, these types of emails will be blocked as well. Ours should have this capability by the end of the year, we hope.

As I mentioned in the last newsletter, I was there June 21 st with the other 12 and 13 year olds picking up my copy of the last Harry Potter book. Ms. Rowling did an outstanding job of tying it up and filling in all the questions the first 6 books brought up. Wow. Like most, I now wonder…ok, what am I going to look forward to reading in the future?

The tomatoes are now in their last stages of dying in this climate…but not before we canned 116 quarts and dehydrated several quarts as well. Unfortunately the pepper plants didn’t do well due to excessive water and I had to pull them up. They were setting peppers but they were rotting just as they matured. Bummer. Now I’ll know to put the pepper plants in raised beds next season.

Best wishes!

Sincerely,

Ben Conner