Here are a list of various functions these programs carry out:

Junk Mail Reporting Program:

- A free service to provide reports on junk e-mail issues reported by Windows Live Hotmail users

- Returns the full message with headers of any e-mail marked as “junk” or “phishing”

- Provides senders an opportunity to clean their e-mail lists and improve the quality of their content

- Helps improve sender reputation by removing unwanted subscribers from lists

Smart Network Data Services:

- A free service that provides high-level insight on how users are rating the e-mail they receive and the health of your IP space as viewed by the Windows Live Hotmail system

- Provides easy online registration and access to data

- Reveals how many users complained about your e-mail

The lawsuit being brought forth by Microsoft, claims that the defendants created millions of accounts in order to have their messages sent through as legitimate mail instead of spam. Then the defendants would contact Microsoft in order to have their company removed from the spam list. Upon catching the culprits, Microsoft claimed they violated federal law; the CAN-SPAM act.

This story will be interesting to keep an eye on for those who keep up with anti-spam information. The defendant, Boriz Mizhen, and Microsoft have butted heads before. In 2003, Microsoft sued the company for spamming and settled for a $2 million payment. Can Microsoft win round 2?

Now, don’t misunderstand me. Many folks make a living by fooling Google and the other search engines. These “black hat” SEOs are extremely clever and hardworking, and they keep at their craft every day. They stay on top of the trends and they surf the changes each day so that they can stay on top of the results.

There’s just one problem with this description. It’s not you.

I mean, if you are a top black hat SEO, what are you doing reading this column from me? If you’re reading this column, you are not anywhere near the knowledge level of a top black hat SEO. I know that because I am not either. I couldn’t begin to do what they do, even though I have decades of experience in search technology and have forgotten more about SEO than most people will ever know.

So, if you are asking where the lines are, because you want to go right up to those lines and then stop, you are fooling yourself in several ways. First, you think that I know the answer—I don’t. Second, you think that if you knew the answer that you’d then be able to skillfully manipulate your site so that it ranked highly—you probably won’t.

But the biggest problem is that it is entirely the wrong question for you, borne out of the wrong attitude toward search marketing. Your goal for search marketing ought not to be to manipulate the search engines to show your pages and manipulate your customers to buy. No, I am not here to help you get into heaven—if you can live with your conscience after manipulating folks, I am not here to condemn you or absolve you from your sins. No, I am counseling you against the manipulation approach for a more basic reason—it won’t work.

You won’t succeed at manipulating Google. And you likely won’t succeed at manipulating customers, either—at least not for very long. The Internet, and social media in particular, has changed that game. You might be able to fool one person, but you can’t fool everyone and they talk to each other all the time.

So what is the right strategy? It’s simple to understand, but difficult to execute. You need to have what people want (the product or service they want as well as the information they want) and you must promote it and optimize it and draw attention to it. In other words, you must do your marketing.

If you do, people will notice and eventually Google will, too. But if you instead want to see how fast you can go without getting caught, you’ll find out that you made very good time, but you didn’t know where you were going.

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“By eliminating spam originating from within their networks, service providers can reduce their costs while improving the service levels they offer their customers.”

More than three-quarters (78%) of service providers surveyed said it is important or extremely important to identify the senders of spam within their networks as part of an outbound spam solution.

Seventy-five percent said deploying an outbound spam solution will help them to improve their customer service.

The majority (80%) of email users surveyed believe that it is important or extremely important that their service providers actively ensure spam is not sent out from their networks.

“Based on the results of this research study and our discussions with service providers, many providers that have tried to prevent outbound spam using various techniques are still suffering from false positives and poor detection levels,” said Asaf Greiner, Commtouch’s vice president of products.

“The only way to effectively keep off of blacklists is to block outgoing spam while simultaneously targeting the sources of the problem – the spammer accounts, compromised accounts, and zombies.”

I got the idea for this article when I read a post by Tim Ferris called Tim Ferris Scam – How to Deal With the Haters. The article offers some practical real world advice ( I’m particularly fond of the Colin Powell quote), but this post is really just about dealing with the SEO aspects.

First and foremost, approach the problem from a customer service perspective. Drop the person an email or, better yet, a phone call and FIX THE PROBLEM. If someone wrote a bad post about you when they felt they got the shaft, chances are good they will post another when you bend over backwards trying to fix it.

Let’s say that won’t work–or maybe you’re in an unsavory industry, like one that engages in rebilling. What do you do? Because you are almost always going to be an authority for your own name, ranking for “brand name + KWD” should be easy. One post, a bit of internal anchor text, and a few scraper links should do the trick. Make sure you use “brand name + scam” in the title and in the anchor text when linking to the page and try and use the phrase in the main body copy at least once.

Have more than one negative listing you want to displace? Wait til your post is scraped, rewrite your original post, and link to the most authoritative scraper and that too. Need another? This is the time to maximize the list of parasite SEO sites, like squidoo, google knol, wordpress.com, and others.

So what should you talk about on these pages? Explain why your product or service isn’t a scam. Speak directly to the problems or issues people are having. Don’t sidestep or put a spin on it. You can fool some people, but most people know when they are being lied to.

In this age it’s inevitable that someone will say something negative about you, and you need a strategy to deal with it. You can choose to be part of the conversation, you can use some of the tactics discussed here, or you can try a combination of both.

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Robert Kao, CEO of SmrtGuard said this of the new services, “Our goal is to provide the most comprehensive mobile security solutions for businesses and individuals, while making it as easy to manage as possible. anti-virus and anti-spam protection was the next logical step for SmrtGuard as smartphones, like PCs, have increasingly become an essential part of our business and personal lives.”

The new anti-spam feature has already been launched for the i-Guard security suite, which is specifically designed for Indosat. The only mobile phone carrier in Indonesia.

Guntur Siboro, chief marketing officer of Indosat said this of the new features, “We’re extremely excited to be able to offer our BlackBerry users these additional protection services. Virus and malware threats to smartphones are becoming increasingly prevalent and SmrtGuard’s innovation allows us to be on the cutting edge of mobile security.”

Along with Blackberry devices, SmrtGuard is available through Android. Along with those platforms, Symbian will be getting its version of SmrtGuard soon as well.

It’s funny how we have to start worrying about virus and spam problems on our mobile devices. Traditionally, our desktop and notebooks were all we had to concern ourselves with in regards to spam. I guess it’s time we shifted our focus to our mobile devices as well.

If you would like to find out more about SmrtGuard, you can find information about their services here. Unfortunately, their anti-spam feature isn’t available with their free service, so you will have to upgrade to SmrtGuard Pro.

While Rustock has reduced the output of individual bots by 65 percent, it has increased the number of active bots by 300 percent, making up for the decreased output. Meanwhile, Cutwail has reduced in size to 600,000 bots down from 2 million bots in May 2009 and is now responsible for only 4 percent of all spam. Rustock remains the largest spam-sending botnet responsible for 32.8 percent of all spam.

“Affected by the closure of ISP Real Host in August 2009, Cutwail likely lost the ability to update some of its bots causing its numbers to diminish greatly without the ability to recover,” said MessageLabs Intelligence Senior Analyst, Paul Wood.

“As a result, Rustock has taken over significant volumes from spammers by undercutting the market with greater capacity and lower operational costs.”

Also in April, MessageLabs Intelligence analyzed passive fingerprinting (PF) signatures of spam email traffic to learn the types of operating systems that were running on the infected spam-sending computers. Many of the infected machines were running Windows and the percentage of spam with a PF signature was similar to the Windows share of the operating system market.

“Spam is more commonly sent from computers running Windows than from those running other operating systems,” Wood said. “However, spam not identified as coming from botnets was seen in lower proportions coming from Windows machines than from known botnets.”

Well, they do sometimes get help from webmasters who report other websites using spam techniques to gain a better ranking.

Some webmasters believe that submitting a spam report is simply a waste of time as they never get looked at by Google, but Matt Cutts wants to set the record straight.

Check out Matt’s video below explaining how they determine which spam reports are acted on.

Matt says that there are quiet a few people at Google who read the spam reports, however it is hard to act on each and every complaint. Due to the large volume of reports they get, they prioritize each dependant upon the highest impact on users. If an offending website is not in English, then don’t worry, it will be penalized as well.

So, you can rest assured that if you do “dob in” another website to Google, there is someone there looking at your complaint.

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Alison Southwick, BBB spokesperson warns of the scam, “What’s past is prologue and it was inevitable that scammers would take advantage of the excitement over the iPad to rip people off, just like they did with the iPod and the iPhone.Bogus offers most commonly claim you can become a tester or researcher and get an iPad for free. This is a deal that sounds, and definitely is, too good to be true.”

One of the first spam e-mails to circulate requested testers for the iPad, which led victims to Testitandkeepit.com. Upon entering the site users were told iPads would be sent out for testing, and they would be able to keep them as compensation. All you have to do is give up your email address and password, so your friends can know about it.

The iPad scams aren’t just surfacing through emails, but social networks are having problems as well. A Facebook page, ‘iPad Researchers Wanted—Get an iPad Early and Keep It’ popped up which tried to get users to sign up for a cell phone service charging $10/month. Facebook was alerted of the scam, and the page went down. Not before receiving 3,500 fans though. Proof that there were plenty of desperate consumers out there.

Along with the first two scams, the tried and true “buy items and receive free iPad” method is circulating through email as well. The scam has purchasers buy items in order to receive a free iPad as a gift. The only method to pay for the items is a credit card; you can imagine where things go from there.

The BBB recommends that consumers purchase their iPads through Apple directly, or an authorized retailer. If shoppers are too anxious, then a safer option would be to make a purchase through a secondary market; sites like Craigslist or eBay. Secondary retailers aren’t without problems, but they’re certainly safer than suspicious emails and ‘too good to be true’ Facebook pages.

The BBB has provided a guide available where online shoppers can get tips on how to shop safe: http://www.bbb.org/us/consumer-tips-technology/

Alison Gendar explained, “Digati had sunk almost $50,000 into a variable life insurance policy sold by New York Life and wanted a fourfold return.”  New York Life refused to comply, and Digati responded by saying he’d send out six million critical emails (and contact 200,000 people using social networks, too).

This caused New York Life to contact the FBI, and now, Digati’s been arrested and charged with one count of extortion through interstate communications.

Also, although Digati’s bail was just set at $50,000, one condition is that he stay away from computers, so everyone’s inboxes should remain safe as the case is brought to trial.

It’ll be interesting to see if the outcome of this case has any effect on how more malicious spammers are viewed by the law.  At the least, the judge is likely to make some comments about spam that’ll be referenced by prosecutors.

I have an admission to make: I don’t like comment spam. You are comment spammers. Our readers don’t like you. I don’t like you. You’re not welcome here.

Our Akismet filter has been doing a good job of filtering out spam and our commenting filters within Disqus catch most of the non-automated spammy comments. But they still persist. Most people active online have real names (obvious I know, but stay with me). If they don’t use their real name, it’s popular to use a “handle”.   I can see that it might be reasonable for some people to have a few different handles, but for the most part, singular identities are the norm.

Where the “identity crisis” comes is the persistent and pervasive use of what I consider, spammy handles in blog comments. Doing this is as old as blogging itself.   It started with legitimate beginnings though. For example, I used to put “toprank” in the name field when making comments on other blogs since that’s my handle. Today, I just use my own name.  Apparently, there are a large number of people named, “internet marketing minneapolis” or “insurance leads”. I don’t think so.

We “no follow links” within our blog comments due to abuse by SEO spammy types. Actually, most of them are not professional SEO’s at all. Pro SEO’s would not be so obvious and stupid as to blatantly use keywords as a person’s name when the links are no followed. It’s a waste of time.

So, to “internet marketing india” and “buy viagra and ciallis here”, I’m pretty sure those aren’t your names or your handles. My position with this blog is that if you opt NOT to identify yourself as a person, then the comment has no place here.

My preference is for readers to use real names. When people do that, their comments also tend to be more thoughtful, intelligent and useful to other readers. Additionally, when people use a handle or nickname to reference themselves online, it’s usually a good comment. However, with the popularity of Twitter, most people use their Twitter handle which is often a one-word name anyway.

I simply draw the line with people (or bots) that insist on using keywords they want to rank for in search engines as their “Name” in our blog comments.  Same goes for those that decide to use a two word name that then decide to link to a sales letter for some kind of “automate all your online marketing” software.

We’ve published a blog comment policy several years ago, but after adding Disqus as our comment management system, we cannot link to it in the same way. However, there should be a link at the end of each blog post now so readers can our guidelines for commenting.

After blogging for 6 years, I’m not ambiguous in my thinking about this. I’d be curious to know if readers think this is extreme, but I have no problem saying that I’m pretty firm in this policy and not buying in to the argument that there’s an implied reciprocation that should happen when people comment that involves a keyword link in exchange.

If you’re a long time blogger, what decisions have you made about a blog comment policy?

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