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New emailing rules go into effect at the end of this month. Don’t get caught with your pants down on this one or you might have a problem. The changes aren’t earth-shaking but you will need to know and comply with them if you email any kind of commercial message to a list of virtually any kind.

The Federal Trade Commission has now issued four new rules that amend the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. The amendments go into effect at the end of this month - June, 2008.

The amendments affect all senders of any commercial email with a list of any size from 2, on up.

Here are the rules:

#1 The receiver of the email cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her email address and opt-out preferences, and must be able to opt-out of the mailing list using a SINGLE ACTION.

This may be by replying to the email - or by clicking ONE link to go to a SINGLE web page.

#2 The use of the word “person” is defined in regard to whether the CAN-SPAM Act applies. “Person” is now defined to include non-companies. In other words, any and everyone can be liable for sending commercial email - breathing person, company, organization, etc.

#3 You may use a post office box or private mailbox (PMB) - rather than the address of an actual private building - as the physical address in your commercial mailings to satisfy the CAN-SPAM Act.

#4 For any mailing containing advertisements from 3rd party advertisers, either the party who the email is “from” must have an advertisement in the email - or - all of the advertisers with ads in the mailing are responsible for opt-out requests.

This is known as the “Designated Sender” rule. When the party listed in the “From” field has an ad in the mailing, that party becomes responsible for processing opt-out requests.

Source: http://www.i-cop.org/journal/06-23-08.htm
Author: jl scott
You can read jl scott’s take on this in the June 23rd i-Cop Newsletter.

In my opinion, these new amendments cover the places where people most often run afoul of the CAN-SPAM Act. The most common error is not having a “single option opt-out.” And since the term “persons” now includes non-companies (individuals, in other words), it is easy to be in non-compliance even if you are sending emails to a group from your AOL or Gmail accounts or even from your desktop if your email contains any type of commercial solicitation.

Please be aware that complying with the Act and the new amendments is YOUR responsibility as a mailer. If you’d like to read the entire 109 memorandum on these amendments, you can get it here.

Video instruction helps shorten your learning curve when faced with using new software and shows you how to get the most out of your new tools. I use videos to learn new software, programming or any other challenges whenever it is available. And being able to download entire sets of videos on a single subject means they’ll be there when I need to review them.

Professionally-produced video sets currently available show you how to get up and running with some of today’s most popular software. Start Blogging with WordPress. Set up and easily adminster your website with no knowledge of HTML or PHP using a Content Management System (CMS) such as Joomla!, Mambo or Drupal. Create a Membership site using the proven and easy-to-use DLGuard. Create, manipulate, correct and improve photos, graphics and images with theGIMP, and much more.

How Do I Do That? Videos has a new annual membership option that gives subscribers 12 months of membership for the price of 11. With monthly and annual memberships, free videos and samples of every video set, HowDoIDoThatVideos.com has created a resource for anyone needing to “learn and earn” on the Internet.

Video instruction helps shorten your learning curve when faced with using new software and shows you how to get the most out of it. I use video tools to learn new software or programming challenges whenever it is available. And being able to download entire sets of videos on a single subject means they’ll be there when I need to review them.

We’re including a sample video from the July 2008 set - Drupal Content Management System to give you an idea of the quality of HowDoIDoThatVideos.com video instruction. This is video 3 of a 17 video set and shows you how to do a manual install of Drupal.

When I worked with the interactive (web and internet) departments of some ad agencies, we had at least one person whose whole job was quality control. They went through the code after we finished with it and cleaned up anything that wasn’t right. The age of Dreamweaver was sort of like the digital photography takeover. Almost anyone could do it, but overall quality fell. The error was believing that the search engines would find a way to tolerate the sloppy code and still produce great rankings - or even want to. That was quaint but not true.

Good clean code still helps with search engine rankings. I have at times given in to quantity over quality and it’s bit me most every time. Haste truly makes waste. Google, Yahoo, MSN et al still black mark bad code and things like misspellings. It’s not that they have the tolerance for error of teaching nuns - they frankly have no idea what a "webstie" is - nor do they care. Quality control lives.

Another problem with sloppy work is that once you discover it, you have to go through every page and correct the issues. Errors in spelling would be obvious to most of us, but errors in coding, while invisible to us, stand out like a flare to a machine reading the code as a text file - which is exactly what it is.

I recently read a page where the writer used every version of “there” - “there”, “their” and “they’re” and used everyone of them in the wrong context. Another used “your” for everything. “Your a great person, but I have no use for your poor grammar.” If you know where the error was in that sentence, you’re one of the majority, but that’s not good enough.

This is tough on those whose native language is not English, but some of the worst offenders seem to be those to whom English is a first language.

I have no doubt that I’ve made many of the same type of mistakes. I try to look over each article more than once and proof-read after letting the article sit for a while (it’s ALWAYS a bad idea to proof-read your own copy, but sometimes we are all we have).

The WYSIWYG editors of most of the Open Source web solutions we recommend have a built-in spell checker. That can help a lot.

But don’t always rely on the spell check function. Spell check is great, but it can’t tell that “tome” is wrong when you meant “to me.” Some of the worst atrocities can be traced to copying from a spell- and grammar-checked Word doc and then pasted into a WYSIWYG editor. This would very likely produce mostly accurate spelling and grammar, but could also produce butchered code that would display very messily in a web browser.

So take a little time before you hit the “Publish” button. Run spell check, correct any errors it finds, then save the page and walk away. Do something else before you proof-read. Or better yet, have someone else proof-read it.

Losing your laptop sucks. It isn’t just the money, it’s everything on the computer that should have been backed up but wasn’t.

There are several tracking solutions that track the computer after it’s been lost or stolen and report important information back to a datacenter. But if the datacenter can track the computer and ne’er-do-wells who stole it, theycan also track you. And that raises some serious privacy questions.

But what of you could track your Mac or PC laptop without the aid of a datacenter? Wouldn’t that be nice?

GadgetTrak, anti theft for mobile devices, has solutions not only for your Mac or Windows laptop, but also for your Blackberry, Symbian or Windows Mobile device, Portable drives and devices such as iPods, MP3 players, flash drives, memory cards and digital camers can also be tracked using special USB software. And protection for your iPhone or Touch is coming soon. GadgetTrak’s pricing is very reasonable.

There’s no guarantee that you can recover your missing device even with this software, but it sure increases the odds.

GadgetTrak is at: http://www.gadgettrak.com