With all the bad news about the economy, bank bailouts and who knows what’s next, email scammers are very quick off the mark as this email, in the FIR comments Gmail account this morning, suggests. It’s worth repeating: If you get any email from your bank, or other financial company who you do business with, [...]
Spam
A marketing email from Dell caught my eye amongst all the inbox content because of the subject line: “Was it something we said?†Curiosity piqued, I clicked on it to open it, and saw the eye-catching image you see above. The mixture of garish colours and popping eyes of the model really grabbed my attention, [...]
Content summary: A special live call-in episode, recorded on BlogTalk Radio, featuring a distinguished panel of experts addressing the issue of PR spam. Listen to FIR now: [display_podcast] Get FIR: Download the MP3 file (21Mb, 61:11) Subscribe to the RSS feed Get the show at iTunes Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you [...]
Since I last wrote about PR spam a few weeks ago, I’ve been keeping an eye on some of the email that’s ended up in the spam folders in Outlook. It’s a never-ending stream of spam, and it’s getting worse – it’s now running at an average of 10-15 emails a day. Recognizing that ‘spam’ [...]
Last October, Chris Anderson of Wired magazine outed over 300 email addresses as spammers. In May, Lifehacker.com’s Gina Trapani started a PR Spammers wiki. These two acts are symptomatic of growing frustration and anger by many people who perceive the PR profession of behaving like spammers in how PR practitioners pitch online. Is the PR [...]
Like many in the PR and journalism blogosphere, I get PR pitches by email every day. Like many, too, I welcome pitches if they are relevant to my interests. If they are, the chances are good that I will talk about the product or service, either in my blogs or podcast, or I might Twitter [...]
Yesterday, I installed an addition to the first line of defence against comment and trackback spam that Akismet is so successful at. That addition is reCAPTCHA, a plugin for WordPress (with versions for other platforms), that adds a step to commenting – one that’s increasingly common on other platforms, too – which requires you to [...]
I got sixteen individual items of junk mail through my letterbox this morning. Home furnishings, credit card offers, pizza restaurants, insurance… it goes on and on. Much of it has the pseudo-personal approach of “specially delivered to you by hand,” etc. Is anyone really fooled by that? Today’s quantity is more than usual. The usual [...]
Following the launch of the new Plaxo last week, I have been thinking that maybe enough time has passed from the bad days of Plaxo that perhaps it’s time to try it again. Shel and I even talked about it in last Thursday’s FIR #253. Then I got four requests by email from friends asking [...]
If you’ve noticed a sudden upsurge in spam email in the UK recently, offering sex, stock tips, genuine fake Rolexes and the usual pharmacopia, it could be the result of criminal gangs using hijacked computers, says a Reuters report. I’ve been getting loads of such spams recently, all of which have managed to get through [...]
31 
213 
11
