Computer nuisances keep changing, not to say evolving over time, and the latest is being flagged as a spammer, with the dire consequence of being denied e-mail service.

Years ago users would mainly worry about hard disk failures, screens that would break and similar technical issues; it quickly became the least of their worries. After the price of basic hardware fell to incredible lows people stopped losing sleep over replacing it.

Then came viruses and life with the machines and the web would never be the same again. Still, with good antivirus and Internet security programmes, products that are inexpensive and easily available, the risk of infection can be reduced virtually to nil.

Though it has been affecting e-mail traffic and annoying users for a while now, this year spamming has acquired a new, more dramatic dimension. It has now grown into a most irritating e-mail issue and the worst is not when you receive these unwanted messages but when you are “flagged as spammer” by the Internet authorities! For once you are, you stop being able to send e-mails, or receive any, or even both; partially or completely.

How do you get “flagged as spammer”? There are three possibilities.

The first is when you ARE a spammer. Over a rather long period you keep sending messages to very large mailing lists, typically to parties and people you don’t personally know and who have not asked for your messages in the first place, this to promote various products, services or events. This is when you are the cyber criminal.

The second is when a third party hacks your e-mail address and sends massive spam in your name, without you being aware of it, of course. Your very e-mail address is therefore detected as a source of spam e-mail. This is when you are the victim.

The third is when you send legitimate mass mailing to large lists of people you know, or parties you have business with. Whereas this is justified, perfectly legal and does not qualify as spamming, it can sometimes be detected and flagged as such. This is when you are the victim because of the system mistakenly putting you in the spammer category.

If the first group deserves the punishment the other two don’t of course. Unfortunately cases where users are unfairly treated as spammers are dramatically increasing, the Internet authorities often being unable to tell the victim from the criminal, the legitimate from the legitimate.

Large organisations, businesses and corporations who have a server computer in their setup, especially with their own Internet domain name (@mycompany.com for example), are more at risk that private users who use straightforward e-mailing and services such as Microsoft’s hotmail, Google’s gmail or Yahoo’s mail.

The ugly part of being flagged as a spammer and being therefore denied part or all of the e-mail service lies in the difficulty of reversing the situation and going back to normal status. It takes the intervention of IT professionals with the Internet authorities and the ISP (Internet Service Provider) to remove the dreaded flag. It is neither a quick nor an easy procedure.

If sometimes things would go back to normal in a just a few days, in some cases it can take up to three or four weeks to undo the damage done. In the meantime the user suffers from e-mail service denial, something that nowadays is not much different from lack of oxygen to the brain – for some people at least.

Are there any preventive measures to take to avoid the shame, the frustration and the interruption of e-mail service, assuming naturally that you are not a cyber criminal who is planning to send spam intentionally?

Firstly ensure that you have not only a good antivirus programme but also solid Internet security software tools that will reduce the risk of seeing your e-mail address, mailbox and password stolen. Then avoid sending huge mass mailing too frequently, even if it is to those you know, just to avoid being suspected of being a spammer. Life with Internet and e-mail comes without any warranty, even for the innocent and the well-intentioned.

Keeping email messages relevant, polling customers, leveraging social media and video functionality, and creating campaign landing pages are just a few of the ways small and medium-sized business (SMBs) can maximize their email marketing strategies.

Though email is a fundamental communication tool for firms of every size, recent data suggests that SMBs – in particular – are getting set to step up their use.

The Proof

More than one-third (36%) of the smallest businesses in North America say they plan to begin email marketing in the next 12 months, according to a survey conducted by Hurwitz & Associates for email delivery company Campaigner, reports Marketing Charts.

Another recent survey by VerticalResponse found that 74.1% of small businesses plan to increase their use of email marketing and 68.3% will increase their use of social media in 2010. Only 3.8% of respondents do not plan to use email marketing in 2010.

And as further proof of stepped-up use, Constant Contact’s fifth annual Small Business Holiday Outlook Survey revealed a notable increase in SMB’s use of Internet-based marketing strategies vs. similar surveys conducted last year and in February 2009. It also found that substantially more small businesses plan to use holiday-related email marketing this year (89% vs. 60%) and 43% expect to increase online holiday sales (vs. 38% in 2008).

Since February, Constant Contact also found that significantly more small businesses are using other digital platforms and tools to market their products and services. These are, in order of popularity: email marketing, online advertising, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

MySpace is the only platform small businesses are using less today than in February, the survey found.

The ROI Story

Email marketing delivers the biggest bang for a firm’s investment dollar. The latest ROI figures come from DMA’s newly released Power of Direct Report, according to Strongmail. It found that commercial email now returns $43.62 for every dollar spent on it in 2009 – a $1.31 drop from last year, but still double the ROI of search advertising, which is the next most effective channel with an ROI of $21.85 for every dollar spent.

Some Tips

As SMBs rev up their campaign plans and put the final touches on their holiday initiatives – the following tips may help to boost returns even further:

* Involve customers. Constant Contact suggests polling customers to determine which products should go on sale. Letting a popular vote determine sale items will give recipients an incentive to send friends and family the survey, spread awareness about the offering, and extend its reach.

* Brand all forms of communication. Constant Contact also suggests that SMBs ensure their company name, logo, messages, and tone are consistent from one communication to the next. This will help reinforce brand recall.

* Keep it relevant. Make sure messages are relevant to the customer or prospect base. Some 41% of consumers find that promotional offers are irrelevant, according to a study by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and InfoPrint Solutions Company. In fact, increasing relevance is vital not just to growing a customer base but to maintaining an existing one: The survey found that 41% of overall respondents would consider ending a brand relationship because of irrelevant promotions, and an additional 22% say they would definitely defect from a brand.

* Incorporate social media. Social media is not on par with email marketing in terms of reach and ROI – but it is a growing force to be reckoned with. There are a number of tools that can help marketers enhance their campaigns by incorporating Facebook, Twitter and other platforms.

* Don’t forget video marketing. The same holds true for video e-mail marketing, which is quickly developing its own ROI case, along with new tools and strategies.

* Create a landing page for every email campaign. Email marketing provider Campaigner suggests this as part of its “Tips for Getting Started with Email Marketing” series. It takes on added significance as more robust web analytics applications come online. Creating a landing page for each campaign “pays dividends by making it easier to see who’s responding, how quickly and which messages or keywords are working,” Campaigner said.

BragIt today releases version 1.0 of “BragIt HTML Slideshow”, a plug-in to Adobe Lightroom. Its target group is people who want to publish a collection of photos to the web like a slideshow, telling a story. Visitors to the website can scroll through thumbnails of all photos, and then start the slideshow to see large photos sequentially with annotations below each photo.

It becomes a flash slideshow  where the viewer is in full control of when to see the next photo, and it does not require any Flash plug-in. Since the resulting slideshow is based on HTML, it is fast and requires no browser plug-ins. And visitors who use a browser that understands color management will see good colors that are close to the ones you see in Lightroom.

The resulting slideshow has a scrolling index page of all photo thumbnails, an identity plate, and an introductory description. The full frame version of each photo can have multiline captions in a compact design to make room for photos in both landscape and portrait orientation with separate bounds for width and height. When a full frame photo is clicked, it advances to the next full frame photo.

Pricing and Availability:
The plug-in has extensive choices for text labeling, fonts, layout and color controls. You can download a demo version that is free to use as much as you like, but it is limited to 10 photos. For use with more than 10 photos, purchase an unlocked version for only EUR 10.

So many pages are a horrible clutter, a designer’s nightmare. Banner ads scream at you, pop-ups jump up and down and blink at a crazy pace, hideous animated videos keep clamouring for attention.

No more at Doubleclick’s place. We’ve discovered Readability, described as a bookmarklet by its maker, New York design house Arc90 Lab.

Readability removes the junk and just lets you read the text, presented in a beautifully simple, clear, clean layout.

The bookmarklet is free. You simply go to the Arc90 site and drag a bookmark to your browser’s toolbar. That’s all there is to it: a button marked Readability now resides in the toolbar.

When you find one of those annoying, flash slideshow, blinking web pages, you just click on the Readability button, and in a flash all the irritating bits are gone.

Not everyone thinks this is a great idea: especially not the producers of animated ads, who badly want your attention and reckon they’re paying for the pages you read for free.

Readability is claimed to work on all the major browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google’s Chrome.

Doubleclick had no trouble installing it on Firefox but ran into some difficulty with Safari. The Arc90 web page wouldn’t display the necessary draggable button.

No great problem, we simultaneously opened a Firefox page and dragged the button across to Safari’s toolbar. Works perfectly.

If you like it — and we haven’t found anyone who doesn’t — you might also like to try Instapaper, a free tool that saves web pages for later reading.

The opposite is true. The health care bill the House of Representatives passed Nov. 7 would not allow insurance plans sold through a proposed government-regulated health care exchange to cover abortions except in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is in danger.

The mailer claims a “government run health care experiment … federally mandates coverage of abortion.”

The statements in the mailer are accurate, Broun spokeswoman Jessica Morris said.

“It states, ‘Dr. Broun will fight to stop health care plans that: … Federally mandates coverage of abortion,’ and that is what he will continue to do,” Morris said.

Some constituents who received the brochure complained it left the false impression that the House bill mandates abortion coverage.

“I think it’s totally misleading,” Athens resident John English said.

The mailer was finished two weeks ago, before the House passed an amendment to the health care bill by anti-abortion Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., Morris said. The amendment bars both the public option – a proposed government-run health care program – and subsidized plans offered by private insurers from covering most abortions.

The four-page color brochures were printed and mailed at taxpayer expense. They were sent to about 100,000 registered voters, Morris said.

Russell Edwards, a University of Georgia law student who runs an anti-Broun political action committee, called them a waste of tax money.

“Paul Broun Jr.’s use of taxpayers’ funds and public resources for his own personal agenda is wrong,” Edwards said. “His health care mailers are only meant to scare families in our district into giving him their money and their vote.”

The Franking Commission, a bipartisan committee of lawmakers, vets all taxpayer-funded mass mailings from congressmen to constituents to ensure they are not too political.

Broun was criticized for his use of the franking privilege in early 2008, when he spent most of his office budget for the year to send about nine letters and brochures while in the midst of a hard-fought primary race.

“Dr. Broun values direct communication with his constituents and frequently sends important updates through the mail,” Morris said.

The brochure also includes an outline of Broun’s own health care bill and a survey that recipients can fill out and return to his office.

Hostopia, a business unit of Deluxe Corporation (NYSE: DLX), announced today that it has successfully developed and deployed SNAP, a new technology that helps migrate email users without the risks of service interruption, email content errors and the end-user churn that can result from these problems.

“We’ve named our new migration system ’SNAP’. It easily and consistently solves well-known problems affecting service providers who want to move email users to a new platform,” said Dirk Bhagat, Chief Technology Officer, Hostopia. “Many providers are reluctant to upgrade theirmass email systems knowing that users who are migrated are likely to experience email problems such as duplicate entries in their inbox, read emails re-appearing as unread and old emails reappearing with new dates. These and other problems lead to increased support call volumes and end-user churn.”

Hostopia’s SNAP technology uses real-time content mirroring in parallel with the users’ current email system to copy email content in a way that eliminates service issues. SNAP switches the user to the new platform only when all of the information is synchronized, creating a smooth transition with no interruption of service.

Aplus.net, one of North America’s largest web hosting providers is currently using Hostopia’s SNAP technology to support a large email migration. “We are mid-way through migrating 380,000 email and 80,000 web hosting users to Hostopia’s platform,” said Ryan Elledge, Aplus.net COO. “We were very concerned about the end-user impact of the planned migration. Hostopia’s specialized migration team and their innovative SNAP technology are proving to us that email users can be seamlessly upgraded to Hostopia’s platform without service degradation. It helped make our decision in favor of Hostopia.”

Marty Strang, a local collector of railroad photographs, will be giving a slideshow presentation on the Michigan train depots located between Grand Rapids and Mackinac City at 7 p.m. Tuesday.

It will take place at the Tri-Cities Historical Museum, 200 Washington Ave.

Strang has been collecting railroad photos since 1991. Strang is a member of the Grand Rapids & Indiana Railroad Historical Society and the Pennsylvania Railroad Historical Society.