We all know spamming is the scourge of the electronic mail age. It is a great drain on the time of the email user who needs to constantly keep the inbox free of such mails. Some Spam mails, seemingly innocent, can deliver deadly virus to crash your system. Consider someone like me, a PR professional, who constantly faces a bombardment of all sorts of marketing communication, some genuine and others, mostly suspect. I always wished there was something to look up mails before they entered the inbox. I came upon MailBox Cop spam/virus filter. It is easy to use and has advanced features that allow me to quickly review the mails and allow or deny them.

I would like to point out two important features that I found very attractive. First, it keeps track of multiple user choices. This means the whole office gets the benefit depending on the settings made by different users. This is much more powerful than the filters based on single user choices. Second, it provides a regular summary statistics of the spam filtered by the system. Oh did I add the third one? MailBox cop is free to install. You will also get a user guide from the link once you log in.

So, happy spam hunting with MailBox cop!

Isabel Rodrigues - Works for Apollo Hosting
www.apollohosting.com

Welcome to part 2 of our series on blogging. In the first part, we covered some popular platforms for blogging, from hosted services to services you run on your own website. This part will deal with the real meat of the issue, your content. Content is why people will come to your blog, and, more importantly, why they'll keep coming back. Unfortunately, there's no real magic formula that can be applied to any content to catapult the author to the height of Internet stardom.

The most basic question about your blogs content is simple: what is it about? What are you going to be blogging about? There's really only two types of answer to this question, but fortunately they aren't mutually exclusive.

Personal Blogs

The first type is personal. These are perhaps the most common type of blog by far, as the sheer number of MySpace accounts attest. The explosion of the popularity of the blog is driven by a desire to create a diary of personal thoughts or speak out on topics that are very important to the author. For many, the blog is just a modern equivalent to a dairy, just one without the lock and available for all the world to see.

Pure diary style blogs may not be destined for Internet legend, but they generally don't aim for that. They are more about keeping in touch with friends or family, providing insights into a life, and practicing the slightly therapeutic art of writing things down.

Personal blog can also be focused on an issue about which the author feels passionate. Topics range far and wide, such as:

• Political or Social issues
• Hobbies
• Entertainment
• Technology
• Help / Tutorial

Many authors have highly personal blogs that say little about their daily lives and more about their point of view. The rise of "issue" blogs is something that fueled the emergence of blogs and blog authors on the national scene. Bloggers have become opinion-makers and fierce advocates for many causes. This shows that, with the right topic, your blog can be personal, as well as "professional".

Professional Blogs

I use the term "professional" to describe a blog which, among other things, is designed to generate income for the author. There are varying degrees of this:

• AdSense / PPC Networks
• Banners
• Corporate Sponsorship
• Product / Service Sales

The amount of income a blog generates is fairly equal to its popularity. The more popular it is, the more eyes there are to see the ads and fingers to click on them or buy your products.

The great thing about using a blog as a source of income, is that it can still be a highly personal, issue-based blog. A lot of those nationally known opinion-making bloggers run ads on their blog, and take some cash in exchange for their opinions. Though looking to build a popular blog and make some cash on the side should certainly think about starting with something they are passionate about.

Though it's hardly unheard of for someone to write a blog purely for professional reasons, without any personal investment at all, it is a naturally more difficult task. Those prepared to take on the challenge, for the glory, or simply because they lack a passion about anything, should approach the endeavor carefully by researching a strong niche to target. Like any business prospect, solid research is a must for success.

Up Next...

Next time we'll look at a what can be a very fulfilling, or very frustrating (many times both) aspect of successful blogging, the community that develops through the comments on your blog.

Blogs are wildly popular these days, as they provide not only ways for individuals to express themselves, but, in some cases, make some money at the same time. Not all blogs are for money, though. Many are simply expressions of the individual writing them. There are some basic components to any blog, and they are the software, the content, the readers, and, optionally, the methods of monetization. I'll look at each element in a series of posts on blogging in the coming weeks. First up: the software.

Types of Blogging Software

Blogging "software" is generally of 2 types, remote and local. The difference is simply where the blog system is housed, and some might be more appropriate than others.

Beginners may want to seek out remotely hosted blogging services like Blogger.com to start. These services are designed to provide simple online, browser-based administration. Users create an account, log in, and, either write their posts in the browser, or paste in content they wrote in a word processing application. The latter is preferable, as word processing software will provide more proofing tools as well as a way to save a local back-up copy of your blogs.

Some popular remote blogging platforms are:

• Blogger : A service that helped popularized blogging in the first place is now owned by Google and still offers one of the best blogging platforms available.
• MySpace : One of the most popular destinations on the web is, at heart, a blogging platform with significant social networking tools integrated into it.
• LiveJournal : Another popular social networking site is also a blogging platform, where you keep your "journal" and interact with others via friends lists.

Local, or user-hosted blogging clients provide a great deal more flexibility, but may require slightly more advanced web knowledge to effectively operate and customize to the user's liking. These platforms are installed on the users own website hosting plan, and are administered through a web browser. In this they are similar to the remotely hosted services. Local blogging clients allow the greatest degree of customizability and expression on the part of the user.

Popular local blogging clients include:

• Wordpress : A popular blogging platform with a great deal of user support. Wordpress's popularity makes it easy to find themes and addons for it, as well as having a strong support community that is responsive to questions.
• b2Evolution : Similar in scope to Wordpress, it also offers a variety of themes and addons via a dedicated developer community.
• Movable Type : A blogging system from Six Apart that is somewhat unique in offering both free and commercial versions of the software. The commercial version comes with support, giving users a dedicated support system instead of relying completely on the community for support.

These lists are not complete by any stretch of the imagination, merely meant as a starting point for your own investigations. There are many other remote blogging platforms and client software to consider and explore. Many software packages known as "content management systems" also feature blogging components as well.

Perhaps your urge to blog is driven by some favorite bloggers. If so, check out what they use to blog with and see if it a good fit for your own needs. Don't be afriad to try out different packages until you find something that is comfortable. Its likely the most popular bloggers didn't start out using the same platform they are using now. It can be a learning experience, and many common platforms support importing posts from other competing packages.

Next post I'll discuss the "meat" of the blog, the actual content. That is what the readers will keep coming back for, and thus is the most important aspect of a blog.