Number 96: April 13, 2005

If you think your friends and colleagues would enjoy this newsletter feel free to forward it to them. If  someone sent this to you,  today. Outlook 2003 and AOL 9 users, please add us to your trusted or buddy lists, so you won't miss an issue.

This week in Katydid:

• A Dose of Our Own Medicine
• Subscription Information

A Dose of Our Own Medicine
I need medication. Apparently. My good friend, or co-worker, or someone who must know me brought it to my attention. In fact, I have about a dozen people everyday send me e-mail telling me about the medical attention I need. This despite having an excellent filter on my e-mail system.

The format for the HTML e-mail is one large image that contains the real content and then a large block of text hidden in the background color. For now, the e-mail getting through all seems to be from one company as the graphics and products are similar, but surely, your in-box will soon be stuffed with more.

The folks sending me this unsolicited e-mail employ the latest technique to bypass my blocking software as well as the filters my ISP runs. They use language. The hidden text is real copy stolen from other web sites - mostly articles from news sites such as CNN or MSNBC. If you copy and paste a section of the copy in Google, you can find the original article.

I think their strategy is to steal from enough sources and in small enough pieces (a few sentences from different articles strung together) that they may be able to evade copyright infringement. However, I would think that CNN and others would hate that their copy is being used without permission to sell products they don't want to endorse. They would also generate good will with their customers if they took action to prevent the practice.

This technique tilts the board in favor of unsolicited e-mail. It means it is more likely for you to miss e-mail you want (such as this newsletter) than e-mail containing advertisements. The reason is that the unscrupulous marketer easily avoids words that flag e-mail filters, while the writer of this newsletter has to be very careful not to use the common term for unsolicited e-mail.

Everybody hates unsolicited e-mail. According to the latest report from MessageLabs, it now accounts for 73 percent of all Internet e-mail, a 33 percent increase. Still, we can learn from this technique because it shows that using real language will make it more likely that your e-mail will reach its target. You can even assume that the unscrupulous marketers have done the research on how many words will be most effective and the size and number of graphics.

You can turn this template to your advantage, provided you use real messaging and have permission to e-mail your audience. So, the next time you receive unsolicited messaging, before you get rid of it, ask yourself how they did that. Then give your marketing a dose of that medicine; just remember it's not for recreational use.

Top »

Thanks for Reading
This e-mail newsletter spreads mainly by word of mouth. Please send it on to your colleagues. Also, you can read other back issues.

If you have suggestions of web sites to review, writing that buzzes, or a new way of looking at things, let me know. Send your suggestions to .

If you received this newsletter from a friend, please today. Our subscriber lists are confidential; we never sell or rent our lists to third parties. If you want to from this newsletter, please let us know.

Kind regards, 
Kevin Troy Darling

Top »

©2005 KTD Communications | Privacy Information