Who's Using The "Fight Against Spam"
To Tilt the Playing Field?

DELL.com Apple.com SiteSell.com IBM.com American- Express.com Verizon.com * The above traffic results are certified by Alexa.com, the leading traffic-measurement company on the Internet. Alexa is an Amazon-owned, Google-powered Search Engine that measures traffic-popularity based on a sampling of over 10 million users. Click on any of the above Alexa-certified traffic buttons to open a new browser window to Alexa.com for full traffic details.

A small company like SiteSell (30 employees) reaches these lofty heights for one reason only... its products OVERdeliver and guarantee success. Small businesses that follow the CONTENT TRAFFIC PREsell MONETIZE proven process of Site Build It!, really do succeed online. For a quick summary of the process, click here.

In short... SiteSell's unwavering focus "on the rest of us," in its philosophy, product development and educational resources, has levelled the playing field for the "small-small business".

But Now, Again, The Playing Field Is Threatened

Spam is the root cause. It's such a huge problem that large Internet Service Providers (ISPs) (ex., Earthlink, Comcast) and mail services (ex., Hotmail) have put anti-spam technology in place. This technology filters out mail that it evaluates as being spam.

Understandably, these companies had no choice. Their customers were being flooded with unmanageable levels of spam. And we support these anti-spam measures completely.

There is only one problem with this, and it's a big one, when it happens...

Some ISPs refuse to whitelist e-mail that their own customers specifically say that they want. (A "whitelist" is a list of addresses that ISPs maintain to bypass filtering errors.) By definition, if a customer wants an e-mail, it is not spam -- it is e-mail. Despite that, some ISPs still refuse to deliver it.

This, of course, has unfair impact on you, the small business...

1) It prevents you from reaching customers, even if they want to be reached, even if they tell those ISPs that they want your mail.

2) It damages your reputation, as some customers will start to think that you must be a spammer. Your customer will wonder, "Why else would I be unable to whitelist?"

The Great News Is That Not All ISPs Behave In This Way

This site shows you how to explain matters properly to your customer, at exactly the right moment. When you do that, you save your reputation and you can influence your customer to deflect anger to where it belongs... to the ISP who won't let him/her receive the mail.

When the happens, customers are all-too-happy to switch accounts to a responsible ISP or mail service who does honor their customers' wishes by whitelisting.

IMPORTANT Spam and spam-filtering operations affect everyone. This site provides detailed information about how you can protect your own business and customers. It is the comprehensive word on the state of spam, anti-spam, and what the small online business must do to stay alive in today's environment. Your business, literally, depends on it. If you find you absorb material easier and faster offline, print it out. Read it at a convenient time, in a comfortable space. Bookmark this page (deliver-my-mail.sitesell.com), though, because there are links you will want to visit later. Bookmark it anyway. We'll be updating it regularly. And you may not be able to receive our e-mail, through no fault of either of us.

Hopefully, if you are a small business person reading this, you will not "wait until it affects you" (many of history's great atrocities have started with that "not my problem" mentality). Instead, if you value your business and want to retain control of it, become proactive, both as an email-receiving customer and as an email-sending business person. This Web site is a blueprint for getting there.

Let's start at the beginning, so that we are all at the same level of awareness as we work together to solve this problem.

How Did Things Get This Way?

"Anti-spam" has become such a hot topic that it is being used as a competitive selling point. However, there is no single solution to spam.

SIDEBAR:

Click here to see how AOL, Google, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail may, with some good will by all, yet end spam in months.

Instead, stop-gap measures merely produce ever greater complexity in the war against ever more clever and devious spammers. And in response, more and more companies leap into the fray with "the ultimate anti-spam" product -- there are now over 400 such products. So...

Honest, non-spamming small businesses are getting caught up in a blizzard of spam filters, much like dolphins in a tuna net. This is so common that the professionals in the anti-spam field have a term for it...

"FALSE-POSITIVES"

Filters have very complicated algorithms and they face enormous volumes of mail. They make mistakes, inevitably, due to the complexity and sheer numbers. That's why it's called "false-positives."

In a war, this would be called "collateral damage." And have no doubt about it... the Internet world is at war with spammers.

This Web Site Speaks With The Voice
Of "Personal Corporate Experience"

We at SiteSell have been caught in this crossfire and have been hit, likely harder than most, due to our high profile and due to the nature of our industry (unfortunately, the Net marketing industry has more than its share of "get-rich-quick" spammers). To make a long story short...

We have been "joe-jobbed." What is a "joe-job?"

A spammer maliciously forges e-mail to look like it's from sitesell.com, using "sitesell" and my own personal name within the e-mail content and even on the landing page (where you land when you click on that spam). During the joe-job campaign, they make sure, of course, that all the right "anti-spammer" addresses are hit along the way to cause us maximum damage.

The spammers are harbored at gandi.net, a front for a group of spammers, we suspect. We published this story, including our claims about gandi.net -- click here for background information in the original articles published in our Sales from the EDGE e-zine. The article even tells you how to complain to gandi.net (if you received that spam) and how to file a formal complaint to ICANN -- enough complaints can cause them to investigate gandi.net, as the article explains.

Gandi.net has never denied this, nor have they ever asked for a retraction.

The spam intensified, tens of millions of them.

Why don't we give up? Because it's too important...

If spammers can silence critics, we live in a dangerous e-world.

If anti-spammers can be fooled or if they merely take the path of least resistance, and filter out the honest company because of this vicious "joe-jobbing," its profound weaknesses are laid bare.

So we move forward, hopefully in cooperation to stamp out spam together.

We Use Ourselves As "Real-Life" Examples

No hearsay. No rumors. And please understand one thing... we have never spammed, and never will. I, as the President of SiteSell, will sign an affidavit to that effect if this comes to a class action lawsuit.

Our "Top 300" profile, combined with the fact that we are in an industry where there are many spammers (Net marketers offer a myriad of "Get Rich Quick" schemes"), has resulted in us getting caught up in filters before others. Way before.

The "bad news" is that the rest of the small business world is catching up. They either are, or will soon be, caught up by the same practices.

The "good news" is that it has put us on the cutting edge of how to deal with it. It has allowed us to develop a "false-positives program" of protocols, strategies, counter-measures and technology to once again level that playing field.

Net result?

• We have reduced the pain of "being a false-positive" (customer dissatisfaction, brand damage, Customer Support load) by 99%.
  
  
• We "educate and activate" customers, referring them to the REAL "break in the chain" -- this important process...
        • re-builds our credibility
        • puts the pressure back on those ISPs who do not whitelist, and
        • re-establishes a valid e-mail address when customers switch addresses (and/or whitelist at the responsible ISPs).
  
  
• We further educate and activate customers to provide feedback to filters, such as BrightMail, the largest filter that provides filtering for large companies like Hotmail and Comcast.

Caught In A Crossfire... In A Tuna Net

It's far worse than being caught in a mixed metaphor, actually...

To date, the small business person is being ignored. And hurt. S/he is caught in the crossfire, snared in a tuna net... a "false-positive."

And yet... that is not our complaint. We accept that as part of the war against spam. But if this is "friendly fire," then our "friends" should be making certain reasonable efforts on our behalf. But...

If a customer cannot whitelist and get the mail s/he wants from an ISP or mail service, or if a small business person cannot find out why the mail is being filtered... the e-commerce playing field becomes unfairly tilted.

Why does this happen? The reasons are simple and obvious...

1) Some large ISPs, mail services and filtering providers obviously do not consider small business to be a friend in this war against spam.

2) The "tiny voice" of the individual small business cannot be heard. It has no power. Hence, it gets no respect. The solution outlined in this Web site unites all those unheard voices into a single, strong one.

The "False-Positives Program"...

• begins in the spirit of cooperation
• progresses to a "spread the word" movement against irresponsible ISPs and mail services
• shines the light on filtering services that have so far managed to hide from the end-user, and
• finishes with the possibility of a class action lawsuit against those filtering providers who damage small businesses without providing any reason (if you have suffered damage, please be sure to provide the data we need to asssess the viability of a class action lawsuit against filtering providers).

We call this "False-Positives Program"...