The following article was published by Robyn Greenspan on the CyberAtlas website. I found it interesting, you may too!

With spam reaching an all-time high, e-marketers are having a difficult time getting their messages read. But according to an Opt-in News study of U.S. publishers of HTML e-mail, those distributing B2B (business-to-business) newsletters might have the most receptive viewing audience.

Results from the 2003 study indicate that newsletters targeting business professionals boasted a 71 percent open rate, compared to 41 percent of e-zines that are directed at consumers. The open rate for B2B increased 2 percentage points from a 2002 study, while B2C (business-to-consumer) decreased from 49 percent.

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This one just tried to get me and McAfee caught it. I think this one tried to get through via a drive-by intallation. My wife was using my computer and got on one of those websites that popped up about 99 new windows. As I was closing them down, I clicked on the wrong X to close the window. I'm sure you've seen them, the graphic that looks like a window with the typical 3 icons on the top right corner. Looks just like a regular window and with about 10 popups open I was closing them too fast and clicked on a graphic instead of the real close window box.

Anyway this one was an infected file installed at C:\Program Files\Buddy Icons\NLNP057.exe. This file is infected by the IGetNet.dr trojan. This is not the first time I've seen IGetNet's alerts. Usually it's been caught by AdaWare, this time it's flagged as a virus.

Don't you think it'd be a good idea for the Anti-Virus Programs to treat these programs as viruses? If they don't ask for permission, in my book they are.

BTW, I don't use a popup killer. How could I find these critters if I used one?

Microsoft seemingly has a security update a week. Now they got one which according to them "Security issues identified in Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) could allow an attacker to compromise systems with IE installed (even if IE is not used as the Web browser). For example, an attacker could run programs on a computer used to view the attacker's Website. Download this update from Microsoft to help protect your computer." The security update number is KB828750. [Read More!]

We're proving that moving from email delivery to RSS delivery for newsletters can actually increase traffic to a publisher's website. John Botscharow, the publisher of the 3R-Marketing newsletter, told us that since converting to Quikonnex's system of publishing that he's almost quadrupled the number of visitors to his website over the last month. A. Scott Piraino, the writer of ThePopulist column, started publishing on a Xanga.com blogging site in July 2003. He started publishing his articles on Quikonnex.com about a week ago and has significantly increased his readership. The main reasons for this is that Quikonnex.com provides an automatically generated RSS feed and when articles are posted to Quikonnex.com the publisher has the option of automatically pinging Weblogs.com, something the Xanga.com site did not provide him.

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