18 February 2022

Is reporting Spammers worth it?

18 February 2022

I have been on quite a journey of discovery over the past 12 months with identifying, reporting, blocking and permanently suppressing spammers. I am finally achieving some results and improving my process too.

To begin with it was quite a laborious process until I discovered SpamCop.net. Taking the raw source of the email and pasting it inside SpamCop means they do a lot of the heavy lifting for me. They identify the source of the email and where the domain is hosted and they will report it direct to those sources. Super easy to do and highly recommended, the service is free. Because it also provides me with the email addresses that they report it to, I will then also email some of them direct as a belt and braces and engage in a direct communication, especially with the email client provider.

This has resulted in a lot of successful unsubscribes, being added to email suppression lists and getting the offender banned from those email services. That last one is a very good feeling.

The only area that is still a real issue is Google's mail servers themselves, but thanks to my communication with some mail client companies they have pointed me in the right direction with that as well.

This is the link to report spammers direct to Google: https://support.google.com/mail/contact/abuse

Let's take one specific example of a spam message I received recently to illustrate how this process works.

Michael de Groot

21 December 2021

Big Tech, Blog, Computers, Data Privacy, Information Technology, Internet, Social Media

China! Maybe they have sorted Social Media addiction?

Michael de Groot

21 December 2021

Big Tech, Blog, Computers, Data Privacy, Information Technology, Internet, Social Media

I have no idea where China is with Social Media/Big Tech, but I gained a bit of an insight by listening to an episode titled “A fresh take on Tech in China” on the podcast ‘Your Undivided Attention’, which features Tristan Harris, who Co-founded Humane Tech and starred in The Social Dilemma. Do check out these two websites.

https://www.humanetech.com/podcast
https://www.thesocialdilemma.com

I first came across Tristan via an awesome Ted Talk, “How a handful of Tech companies control billions of minds every day”.

Michael de Groot

11 August 2021

Cost Savings, Information Technology, Internet, Media

The entertainment industry is emptying your bank account!

Michael de Groot

11 August 2021

Cost Savings, Information Technology, Internet, Media

I am a big fan of technology, there is no doubt that technology has improved my life significantly. Technology has been advancing exponentially of the past few decades and by far the biggest advancement has been the introduction of streaming services.

I am old enough to remember black and white TV, with just 3 channels, I am old enough to remember fax machines to send letters electronically, I am old enough to remember dial-up broadband at tortoise/turtle speeds, so the fact that we can stream movies and music is just mind blowing. Thank you to the engineers for creating this for us, we are truly grateful or are we?

TV never used to cost much, okay I am in the U.K. and we do pay an annual licence fee to watch programmes on the BBC, about £13.25 per month at time of writing and in return we receive no ads, yippee!

Michael de Groot

9 January 2018

Advertising, Marketing

How many leads are you really converting?

Michael de Groot

9 January 2018

Advertising, Marketing

Current reality is likely to be fantasy. The fact is that the four horsemen, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google are the winners. [Scott Galloway's book The Four Horsemen: http://amzn.to/2CWn5jv]

Their engines are huge, their pockets are even deeper and you have very likely spent a big junk of your earnings with these 4 mammoth organisations.

They are buying up all their competition whenever they pose a threat and will own the internet space for many a year to come, you might as well get used to it.

The only way you are competing on the internet is by spending on ads with Google and Facebook and at this time Facebook is the winner.

Facebook will make $60 billion at least from mobile ads by 2020, that's just in a couple of years time.

You are hoping that AI and automation will save the day and actually it probably won't. The only way you have a chance is to become super personal with your customers and potential buyers. This means spending more on the front end with training your employees to become outstanding communicators and making sure you retain them for longer.

Millennials will rage quit at the drop of a hat, so you better know what they value about your company and make sure you deliver this to them daily.

Lead generation is going to be a much hotter topic in years to come and you will be experimenting with many snake oil providers before settling down with something that you feel happy with.

Remember the customer knows when she's being sold to.

The best organisations are becoming better at storytelling and linking al their teams together and sharing the same message.

Here on LinkedIn in by the way is where this can be most effective. The trouble is most organisations ignore this potential and their employees LinkedIn profiles are a mess. Sorry to be so direct, but it's true.

When your employees have to become better communicators they actually have to become better storytellers. Their own story and that of the company they work for. A perfect blend of the two will create trust and loyalty.

Better get started...

Purgatory: the place to which Roman Catholics believe that the spirits of dead people go and suffer for the evil acts that they did while they were alive, before they are able to go to heaven. Humorous: an extremely unpleasant experience that causes suffering.