Resources from the web site of Well House Consultants on the subject of Spam, Spamming and Spammers. We provide open source training course and business hotel accommodation in Melksham, Wiltshire, England

Unsolicited bulk commercial email ... my mailbox gets clogged up with emails that I don't want, to the extent that I can miss the emails that I do want. This section overs all things "spam" - from information about how and why they're generated though how to prevent them. And we also have articles telling you how you CAN send bulk emails and have them get through, and be welcomed.

Articles and tips on this subject		updated
4520	No cold sales calls please - but delighted to hear from others! Well House Consultants lists all of its numbers with the telephone peference service. We are a small company, with members of our team undertaking detailed techincal work and every call pulls us from that work and we can take a while to get back into the flow. We are delighted to hear from customers, ...	2015-09-30
4315	Welcoming genuine forum posters quickly - but turning away off topic advertisers Running a forum such as the First Great Western Coffee Shop - a public facing site for passengers (and wannabe passengers) on train services in the Thames Valley, Wessex, South Wales and the South West of England - brings in around 70 pubicly posted messages a day. Such messages are the lifeblood of ...	2014-11-16
4135	Introducing your product to Well House Consultants - single, personally tuned email please Have you noticed the number of unsolicited bulk emails you receive that say "If you would like [more information] then please [call / email]" ... yeah, so have I! And there seems to be a trend these days for the spammers to follow up with "Regarding my last email. Were you interested in...". Funnily ...	2013-07-15
3946	Moving from a warning system to a control system - PHP, forum spammers Our railway forum is every-popular - 30,000 visits per month (measured by Google Analytics, so that's pretty close to me saying "30,000 real visitors"), with the average visitor staying long enough to look at between five and six pages. But, alas, our strong user base also makes us a sort-after target ...	2012-12-08
3912	Sand to Arabia, Coals to Newcastle or Woodburners to Russia As I'm filtering out unwanted emails, something occasionally catches my eye and I wonder ...  Hello, My name is Elena and I live in small city in Russia. I have small daughter but husband left us a few years ago. Due to deep crisis recently I losted job and can not pay the heating bills for our ...	2012-11-10
3910	Identifying your real customers and keeping them well informed fast "We don't sell that at the moment, but we'll be reviewing it early next year. Please keep coming back to our website, where we'll be announcing it". Now - have I got something wrong there, or should "customer service", who gave me that answer, added me on to the list of probably hundreds of people ...	2012-11-10
3661	Keeping forum and blog comments clean We're all getting far too used to having to type in a word that's shown in an image, to answer a multiple choice question, to do a sum and type in the answer when we want to post to / comment on an article on a web site. And sometimes those images are quite hard to make out - indeed they seem designed ...	2012-03-24
3506	Cold call contacts - preference services and turning off spam sales approaches A telephone call yesterday, and the young lady introduced herself as Ellie, and started to talk to me about financial planning. She explained that her boss would be in the area next week, and asked if he could meet. "It's funny you should call today - just a couple of hours after a conversation I was ...	2011-11-03
3352	World Trade Register - Certainly NOT worth 2985 Euros. I find it very hard to read fine type that's all in a single paragraph, and I also find it hard to follow text when it's all capitals - so I have taken the "Small Print" of an invitation from the "World Trade Register" and reformatted ot to make it more readable ... The signing of this document represents ...	2011-07-09
3316	Twitter Phishing Trips ... and a great new alert service A new service from Twitter - telling me when people mention me in their tweets. I like it - helps me keep engaged with efriends such as Alex, during very busy times. It's only something that I've seen in the last few days. But at the same time, I've started to receive "message box full" ...	2011-06-04
3190	What do the following web sites have in common? What do http://www.popjustice.com/, http://www.alienexperience.com/, http://bbs.freetalklive.com/, http://forum.virtuemart.net/ and http://www.btiteam.org/ have in common? Need a further clue - the things that's in common is not shared by http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/. Still not got it ;-) ?? ...	2011-03-07
3166	Well house is strong - confirmed? Graham Yes - hello RE: A new industry report has rated your company as STRONG ... yyyyes? good! It is strong ;-) ... Your company is one of only 114 in the UK Care Homes industry getting it right. A new study for 2011 has just been completed that analyzes emerging threats and opportunities in ...	2011-02-19
3016	The legal considerations of your web presence - revisited Can you link that image from another web site? Can you publish pictures you took at the school's sports day? Are you allowed to register the your neighbour's name as a domain? Must you remove out of date information from your web site? Who's responsible if a user of a forum that you host post serious ...	2010-10-27
2884	Hotlinked images onto adult material sites Looking through my web server logs earlier this week, I was surprised to see a considerable number of downloads of our images from sites that I had never heard of, and exploring those sites I found that they display - how shall I put it - material that we do not want to associate with. Our images - ...	2010-07-30
2697	Email metrics and filtering Every few minutes, a spam email drops in my mailbox ... and indeed every five minutes or so throughout the day, our server rejects an email that is so obviously, undeniably spam that it doesn't even bother to notify us of its arrival. This is a long-running graph showing spam (red) and delivered to our ...	2010-03-28
2398	Websitemediasolution and a goldfish called Carl Johnson I think I've seen it said that goldfish have a very short memory. About a week ago, I got an email that was better produced than most unsolicited emails that I get - and as we are in the Web site and web development business, the title was close enough to that of a genuine enquiry for me to carefully ...	2009-09-07
2276	Who is Marc Schneider of Multilingual Search Engine Optimization Inc We give training courses in English. Do we really want to encourage enquiries that bring us sales leads for Lua, Ruby or Python courses that would have to be presented in Chinese, German, Spanish or Japanese? No, we don't - it is a dis-service to everyone concerned if we appear to offer something we ...	2009-07-10
1817	Marc Schneider is still having email trouble Update - July 2009 ... A further article on Marc Schneider From my email box this morning ... Did you receive the e-mail which I sent to you recently (copied here-below)? Please confirm since I have had problems lately with emails intercepted by spam-filters set too high.   Cordially,   Marc ...	2009-07-10
2179	Offers that I can refuse Three business proposals I received in my email this lunchtime ... I'm going to pass on all three, but I enjoy reading about some of the incredible things I get invited to do! 12th May 2009   Dear Sir/Madam,   I would like to know whether you have any part time business offer for me as I'm ...	2009-05-12
2177	Preventing forum spam - checks at sign up You may have seen the IP lookup tool we have on our front page (if not, bookmark http://www.wellho.net and it's the bottom right link) which I use extensively to find out a little bit more about addresses that catch my interest - be they generating unusual traffic on our web site, scouring are pages ...	2009-05-12
2019	Baby Caleb and Fortune City in your web logs? Our web site logs are getting a lot of requests containing "babycaleb" and "fortunecity" ... looking for URLs such as these: /resources/ex.php4?item=http://babycaleb.fortunecity.co.uk/picture.htm? /resources/ex.php4?item=http://64.15.67.17/~artatgig/caleb.htm? and said to be from an Internet Explorer ...	2009-01-31
1978	From spam to mod_alias - finding resources Nine articles on Spam and seven articles on scams ... ninety eight resources that mention spam and twenty five resources that mention scams, out of over fourteen thousand resources on our web site. It's amazing how our site has grown over the years. Looking at some more technical, you'll find 52 resources ...	2009-01-05 (longer)
872	Email metrics How many emails do YOU get each day? How many of them are unsolicited bulk emails that you throw away without evening opening them, or have your server reject? A long time ago, I wrote a PHP script that gives me a quick traffic graph looking back a number of weeks so that I can spot a changing pattern ...	2008-09-15
1763	Co-operating to save, yet we dont The human race can be its own worst enemy in terms of waste and efficiency. What point in spending money when there's an excellent alternative that should be available for free? Ah - the point might be simply that you don't have to co-operate with other human beings in a way outside the norm if you ...	2008-08-21
417	Telephone Preference Service - we're registered If you want to talk to us about a course, please call us. If you're a newcomer to Open Source or have a project you want to talk about - even if it's unlikely that you'll be wanting to be trained, please feel free to call. If you want to sell us a telephone service, holiday, double glazing, or a Jacuzzi... ...	2008-05-17
1532	Comment spam blocked. Please comment via Forums I welcome comments on this blog. There's no way that I want to stop any readers coming back with comments on what I have said - such discussions make a very lively ongoing debate on certain subjects, and other viewpoints add so much to what is sometimes somewhat one sided in what I write. But, this ...	2008-02-11
1523	Ive just received an email from myself. Should I be worried? A friend writes ... Dear Graham, I have just received an e-mail claiming to be from my own address with the above title. Should I be concerned? Short answer - no, you shouldn't be concerned. But this does occur from time to time, and I know that it does concern people, so it's worthy of a fuller ...	2008-01-30
1115	Unexpected visitors to our site Overnight, I received an email from someone how came to our site for a most unusual reason ... "I wonder if you can help me. I have recently started receiving dozens of bizarre emails such as the one below. When I Googled some of the sentences, such as, “To put the top hat on it, he quickly assembled ...	2007-03-22
1037	Impact Engineering and Backscatter Here are two new technical terms for you that I've run across in the last few days. Can you guess what they refer to, or do you know them already? Impact Engineering .... hitting a piece of equipment, typically but not always with a hammer or fist, in order to persuade it to work. Backscatter Those ...	2007-01-16
259	Responding to spam I understand that I shocked someone the other week by purchasing a service that I had seen advertised in a spam email that was going the rounds. I feel justified ... I didn't purchase off the spammer, but rather the spam reminded me of a service that was available and I took the reminder to research ...	2006-06-05