Looks like somebody has got hold of one of my email addresses and added it to some junk cash gifting spam list.

I’m pretty sure who it is too – an English “marketer” well-known for promoting the crappest of crap schemes.

Why do I think it’s him?

Easy – because the only time I EVER used this particular email address was to sign up for one of his mailing lists to see what crap he was talking.

The spam they are sending me is to do with the seriously dodgy “TOCS” which has already been covered and ripped apart on the main site:

The Overnight Cash System by Simon Johansson and Orlando Batista

Short version is – this is illegal to promote if you live in the UK. Elsewhere it may be legal or may not. In any case you’d have to be short on morals and extremely gullible to get involved with cash gifting.

The spam emails I am receiving are coming from this address:

list@thepowercash.com

Please feel free to add this email address to as many dodgy sites as you like [petty, I know, but I was added to this mailing list without my knowledge and requests to be removed are ignored].

This domain is registered to:

Mike Furlow
14525 SW Millikan Way
Beaverton, OR 97005-234
US

admin@instantgreenlive.com

Considering that “Mike Furlow” is allowing somebody to spam using his domain name, he is probably not somebody who is very technically aware or competent in any kind of internet-related business. Be wary of dealing with him.

Spam is rarely a problem for me nowadays as I’m a lifetime subscriber to SpamArrest.

After 2 great years of using SpamArrest I take for granted the huge benefits it offers.

It’s quite satisfying to see that spammers are having zero luck getting their ridiculous advertisements into my email inbox.

You can see the statistics of spam vs real email by clicking the “Overview” tab when you are logged into your SpamArrest account.

Here is my account showing the statistics of spam vs real email from the 17th October 2006 to the 28th November 2008:

I am now a “lifetime” member, I upgraded a couple of months ago for a one-off fee and I highly recommend you try SpamArrest if you are getting tired of spam email.

Try SpamArrest for free for 30 days by clicking here

Apologies to anybody who visited this blog over the past 24 hours as it was not working correctly.

On doing a little detective work behind the scenes I found that for some unknown reason the database decided to empty itself which took the blog down for just over a day.

Luckily I keep a series of backups so I just asked my host to restore from one of my backups and we are now up and running.

My Dad always says that data doesn’t exist unless you have at least 3 copies of it and he drummed that into me from an early age.

If you take one thing from reading this blog, take this:

Back up your websites, MySQL databases and anything else you hold dear to at least three different, geographically separate places.

For example:

1 backup to your spare PC at home, 1 backup to an external disk drive you keep in your (locked) drawer at work/in the office and one backup hidden on some of your hosting space i.e. your Hostgator reseller account.

So even if your site is hacked and then your house burns down, you still have two different copies of your precious data.

Please, go and backup everything now.

Then draw up a backup schedule and get into the routine of backing data up.