Some Awesome Tools

Help keep your contacts organized

Help fight spam

Ok have you ever wanted to update all of you contacts in your address book at one time. Well I found a great tool to help you do just that. This tool will keep all your contact up to date, as well as let your contacts update you. Best of all its free. The program is called PLAXO. It integrates with your email programs like Outlook and Outlook Express. You set of few options, and select which contacts you want to update, and vwalla. You can also create a pretty nifty looking SIG file. The program also gives the contacts that you are updating the option to join in themselves. It is not spam and very unobtrusive. I know that when I moved I had about 150 active contacts that I wanted to update. I did not have phone numbers for all of them, and I didn't want to email individually each contact, one at a time. So I used Plaxo and let them all know my new information. Not only that, when they replied, Plaxo automatically updated me with their information. Addresses, phone numbers, even birthday info was updated, and I didn't have to input each contacts information individually. You get a little icon next to the contact to let you know if it is updated or not.I highly recommend you pick this up. You can find it @ http://www.plaxo.com. This is a great little program for everyone, not just professionals. Check it out and let me know what you think. You will be pleasantly suppressed.

Next, are you tired of spam - who isn't right. Ok here is a program that will help fight spam in you inbox, and let you join a community that puts all this "spam" data into a central data base to help others fight spam as well. You get a rating based on the amount of spam you block and when you report "new Spam". The program also lets you know how much time and money you have saved yourself and the community. This program also integrates with you e-mail program and lets you add information to your SIG file to let people know that they can join, hoe much spam you have stopped, and other things. This program, is shareware and has a 30 trial period of the full program. Ok, the company is called CloudMark and the program is called spamnet. You can get it here @ http://www.cloudmark.com.

I use the programs - I do not work for the companies. I just wanted to pass these along.

Comments

RomanDA

on Oct 22, 2004

wirefree,

I don’t want to burst your bubble on this, but PLAXO has been going around the internet for a long time now and most people are just sick of getting "Hi, I’ve just joined Plaxo and could you update your details" emails. What this program does is to have you send me an email asking me to go to their web site and give THEM all my personal info, um.. no friken way. My email address is out there for my web design company, as well as, skinning, etc, the last thing I need is to GIVE some company ALL my personal info for them to pass it along to whomever. This program was a good idea, but in practice its just a spam machine. When you GIVE them all of your friends and family members email address to get them to sign up, you have basically sold out your friends to this company.

I have a MAJOR Pet Peeve about people giving MY email address out to others, it drives me batty when someone sends out an email using the "TO" box to about 1000 of their closest friends, hey THANKS for giving my email address to every single person in that email, as well as every person that that person sends that same stupid email to.

SPAM to me is not just a minor inconvenience its an invasion of MY computer by these morons. In a typical day I receive over 100+ emails, and I have to sort out what is pure crap, what is a friend trying to get me to forward this AMAZING offer to everyone I know, what is a Virus, and then to figure out the hardest part… what is a REAL Email that might be business related, or need my attention. Now we add to this mix PLAXO and all the people who want me to “update my info” on PLAXO’s site, what a major nescience this is.

If every person that uses email would treat email addresses like they treat their friends phone numbers spam would dwindle down to a trickle from a flood. Please visit: http://www.romanda.org/EmailHowTo.asp for my take on how to help stop this mess.

wirefree, I'm not slamming on you I'm just hoping people will look into programs like this one before they send out all their friends email addresses..

On the Spamnet front, I used if for a little, and it seemed to work ok.
I use a FREE program called SPAMBAYES - Check it out here: http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/

Cafin8ted

on Oct 22, 2004

Well - First off - I agree with what your are saying. Second I feel for you. I have only sent Plaxo to friends and family, I want to stay in contact with. Others I do not even send them an update request. They have a pretty good privacy policy, and for the 10 month or so, that I have been using them, I have not received any "spam" from them, almost forgot about having it installed - until I moved, and then I only had to make one email, and none of my friends or family received any one else’s E-mail address. So as for your feelings on that - I don't know what to say. The other thing I use it for are business contacts. As a I.T. consultant, having this info updated automatically is a time saver times 10. I also use a bulk mail folder in my web mail - which is used before I download my email to outlook which also has "spam filters on ( which I update frequently), and spam net. So I get almost zero spam. I agree SPAM sucks, but I cant stop the hoards of JUNK snail Mail in my snail- mail box. I just thought I would offer up a tool, which I am very pleased with.

I understand that you are not trying to slam me - otherwise, what the hell did I post a blog for. Anyway, I do appreciate your comments, and I agree that SPAM SUCKS.

RomanDA

on Oct 22, 2004

Spam is just a major problem, and it drives me nuts. I think the bigger problem is people sending out crap like "If we forward this to 100 people, Disney will give us free tickes". That or "THIS IS REAL I KNOW IT IS MY FRIENDS FRIENDS COUSINS AUNTS NEPHEWS DOG HAD THIS HAPPEN" kind of Crap. I have a lot of people i love and respect send this kind of useless junk on a DAILY basis, and when i tell them that the email they sent about "BILL #12345 Will make you pay $.10 on every email" is pure B/S they are shocked.

What I dont get is, if its so dang important that you feel 1000000 people need to know about it, then why cant you take 1 min and type the subject line into google and see how many HOAX hits you get?

To me thats more of a problems then the idiots who send out these emails that dont even have rEa-l WorD$ in them.
Those i can filter or at least delete quick enough, its the ones from people that have 100 attached emails only to get to the last one and it shows a URL... Oh lord why?

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