Using Fingertip Marketing to Sell Your Books

Q: What is Fingertip Marketing?
A: Fingertip Marketing is defined as, any marketing that adheres to the following two requirements:

1. It is free of charge.

2. It includes no verbal sales pitch to anyone.

You communicate through your computer keyboard using your fingertips.

In this article, you will find many examples of fingertip marketing. The address is:

www.eBook-marketing.com

Q: How did you come up with Fingertip Marketing as an effective way to sell eBooks?
A: When I was writing my first paperback book, I thought my marketing work was over.

I actually believed that I would be in a universal listing that bookstore managers and librarians would see and then order my book.

Boy, was I stupid!

The truth is that the author must do all of the marketing of his/her book.

There is no universal listing that will get libraries and bookstores to order your books.

You have to become a “salesperson.”

Most authors that I have met are not salespeople. In fact many authors I meet despise salespeople.

The Insurance Sales professional

Think about how the typical insurance sales professional works each and every day.

The insurance salesperson has to call on people called “suspects” of which many are not interested in his/her product. Most people will not be interested in buying insurance.

From the group of “suspects” evolves a smaller group called “prospects.” Prospects are people who are interested in buying insurance.

Out of that smaller group called “prospects” evolves “customers” or the people that actually purchase the insurance policies.

The next day the salesperson gets up in the morning and begins the procedure all over again. Every day is exactly the same as the day before.

Does this sound like fun? It can be a great deal of fun. But most authors I meet would never be comfortable working in an environment like that.

Characteristics of the insurance sales job.

Many insurance sales professionals work eight to twelve hours a day, five days per week. However, they must meet with they’re clients when the clients are ready. Many successful insurance professionals spend weekends selling insurance.

Insurance salespeople are usually restricted to handling specific insurance products and they are restricted to a specific geographical territory.

The Traditional Book Author

Here is the typical day of a book author once the book is published.

The author makes a list of bookstores, contacts the Bookstore Manager or the Community Relations Coordinator, if it is a chain bookstore.

The author then makes a sales presentation to interest the store in carrying the book.

The author will try to schedule a book-signing event or just get the bookstore to place a purchase order for books right away.

The bookstores are called “suspects.”

Most bookstores already have enough books on their shelves so the author has to employ super sales skills in winning over the bookstore decision-maker to buy books or schedule a book signing.

If the store agrees to purchase the book, the decision-maker will tell the author that they will only deal through an established book wholesaler. They do not purchase books from individual authors.

The author must call the book wholesalers or large distributors and sell the wholesalers or distributors in carrying his/her book.

Excellent sales skills are needed for this process.

Several follow-up sales calls are made by the author and hopefully the wholesaler or distributor will agree to carry the book.

Now, the author will go back to the bookstore and offer to present a book-signing event.

The bookstore CRC will jump for joy to get the author signing booked for that day.

Author signing events are usually booked up eight weeks in advance to make sure there will be books available to sell.

The bookstore orders 40 books from the author’s wholesaler. The books will not be paid for until after the completion of the book-signing event.

The author goes to Kinkos or some other office print shop and creates banners, bookmarks, and other marketing materials. The author pays for the materials.

The author calls radio stations, writes news releases and calls personal friends to attend the book-signing event.

The book signing is held. Fifty or sixty people show up to listen to the author.

Five people purchase books.

Immediately, after the book signing the bookstore sends the remaining 35 books back to the publisher.

Thirty days after the book signing the author goes to the bookstore and asks for payment for the five books sold a month before.

The bookstore requests the author to invoice the store at this time. The publisher will receive payment and the author receive a royalty check for those five books purchased from the wholesaler within 90 days of the book- signing event.

Any unsold books that were returned in damaged condition will be credited against royalty payments.

Returns can run between 7% and 35%!

Does this sound like fun to you? How much money does it cost you and how much time will you spend selling five books at a signing?

This is a very realistic example of booksignings. In fact, if the author sells five books at the event the store considers it a success! You have introduced many people that will purchase other books while they are in the store or at a later date.

If you were to present this book-signing example to successful insurance sales professionals that are earning over $100000 per year, they will simply not believe you!

The author spends too much time selling for too little money.

The eBook Author

The eBook author writes a book.

The eBook author posts books on Mightywords.com.

An hour later the book is selling over the Internet. Mightywords is handling payment and fulfillment of each order.

There are no book returns.

Then the author posts the book to other eBook selling websites, negotiating all contracts by e-mail. The author never has to speak to another individual and waste valuable time over the telephone.

The author takes a sample chapter or an article and submits this information to top websites that may be interested in the author’s subject area.

Offering content for web visitors greatly enhances the value of the already popular websites. Almost all of the website content managers will jump for the opportunity to give their web visitors more reasons to come back to their websites.

The sample chapters and articles are given in exchange for links back to the author’s book listing at Mightywords.com, the Booklocker, 1stbooks Library, or perhaps the author’s own website.

If you can propose just four or five new article postings each day for just five days per week, you can achieve tremendous success in selling your eBooks.

This is a great technique used by authors that have to work a regular job for a living. The authors can create and deliver their proposals by e-mail. They don’t have to make business contacts during working hours. By working just a few hours each night and on weekends, each author can drive thousands of readers to his own website within just a few months.

Once the article is posted to a website it will stay in a particular location for a while and then will be “archived” for new subscribers to read later on.

The article will include links back to the author’s website or a designated book selling website and will be referenced by major search engines.

This gives the author a major boost in popularity.

A great benefit of this type of selling for an author is the fact that no words are spoken. No sales skills are needed. If the eBook author prices the book at only $10 per book and each contact for the month sells one book per contact, the author will sell over $1000 in volume the very first month of book selling!

The author will receive anywhere from 25% to 100% of the sales totals based on the arrangements made with eBook sellers and eBook publishers.

For this example let us assume that the author earns $500 clear profit for the first month of selling eBooks.

How much did the author have to spend in marketing the eBook?

Zero!

The author did not have to make banners, bookmarks or other marketing materials.

The author did not have to make a single phone call.

In the second month, if the author executes the same marketing strategy, another 100 eBook sellers or book referring websites will be added to the author’s sales force.

Again, if each eBook publisher only sells one book, the author has $500 plus another $500 from the original websites that are selling or referring his book from their archived web locations.

If the author keeps up this pace and the book selling websites are only sending one new book buyer each month, the author will keep $39000 the first year.

If the author adds a second book, the total could be $78000 or more.

Also, remember the author will receive around 100% of what is selling from his own website.

We are not factoring in you working more than two or three hours per day. We are not factoring in the fact that you can set up an affiliate program like Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble and bring potentially thousands of potential book-sellers to link over to your website and send you business.

The example is based on each of your website content contacts. Each of the contacts has your sample chapter or article sending you just one customer each month!

You are adding hundreds of sales people each month that are working 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. There are no product or territory restrictions.

You may wish to go back and send each contact two or three articles thus doubling or tripling your eBook sales.

You still haven’t spent any money!

Show this model to insurance sales professionals.

Watch how huge their eyes become when they listen to your eBook-marketing plan!

Q: Can I sell my very first eBook without spending any money?
A: Yes. Actually you will have to pay a small amount of money for eBook storage charges but the fee is only $1 per month at Mightywords.com.

Let’s begin by showing you how to take care of marketing your eBook on Mightywords.com

After you sign up you will receive confirmation e-mail and the URL (universal resource locator) of each eBook you upload. Once you have that URL or Internet address of your eBook, consider that a website. In order to sell your eBook you must market the eBook effectively yourself.

You will be put in the Mightywords.com website so people can find you but just as you are listed in a traditional bookstore with a traditional bound book, it is still up to the author to push the book.

Fortunately, you don’t have to spend any money to accomplish this goal. The magic about using the Internet for marketing is that you always have two choices to make. You can pay for marketing or you can get it for free.

It may cost money to get featured on Amazon.com or barneandnoble.com. When you enter a brick and mortar bookstore and see books facing out on a table, the publisher and sometimes the author paid for that placement. Book placement in a retail store just isn’t a whim of the store manager or the favorite employee’s choice. You spend money to get the best position in the stores.

By marketing your eBooks over the Internet, you will always have a choice to pay or not to pay. Elect not to pay. Once you have extinguished all of the free marketing resources then make a decision to pay. You may surprise yourself and really find some great things that work for you without spending a dime for marketing expenses.

I am betting you never run out of effective free Internet resources.

It is absolutely impossible to run out of free Internet marketing opportunities.

Marketing On Mightywords.com

The following Steps will help you succeed in selling your eBooks with Mightywords.com:

1. Go to the section on Mightywords.com that is labeled the “Writer’s Corner.”

Read and re-read all of the free help given you on this site. Visit this site often as Mightywords adds additional Internet marketing resources.

2. If you have a website, join the Mightywords.com affiliate program. If you don’t find the program listing on
Mightywords.com, go to Fatbrain.com’s website at:

www.fatbrain.com

This affiliate program is great. Rather than creating a space on your personal website you get to create your own personal eBook Store, which is stored on Fatbrain.com’s server. You receive an Internet URL that you can link to your site or send to friends and insert in your marketing information. You can give your own special name to that store. Every time someone uses your unique eBook store to purchase eBooks, Mightywords pays you commissions.

You can earn up to 20% of the selling price at this writing. Even if you don’t sell any of your eBooks through this linking process you may earn money on selling other “favorites” that are sold from your web links.

3. Contact discussion lists on the Internet and offer a free chapter of your eBook to the list manager. Copy and paste the sample chapter of your eBook and send this to the list manager. This is an effective technique I personally learned from Angela Adair-Hoy the author of How to Write, Publish and Sell eBooks. (Buy it, Angela has great information) You can find the URLs of the discussion lists in Chapter Seven of this book and on my website.

At the end of the sample chapter insert the precise link to your eBook located on Mightywords.com or the precise links to your Mightywords website store, or both. Make sure you insert the full URL with “http” included. This way a person can open the URLs by clicking on your text e-mail.

4. Conduct a search on Yahoo, the famous search directory. Look up the topic area of your eBook. Put yourself in your reader’s shoes. What kind of information would they be looking for that your book is a perfect fit?

For example, if you have written a Southwestern Style Cookbook, who would be interested? Would people that are vacationing to Arizona or New Mexico be interested in southwestern style cooking? These people may be interested in Cowboy Poetry, or travel information.

Lets assume they enter search words like, cooking then Arizona or New Mexico. Your job is to search using the same words. Take the first 10 search returns and send an offer to the webmasters at each website. Offer to send the webmasters free articles or free chapters that will be posted on the websites. Top websites usually offer free content to their visitors. In exchange for posting your free chapter, tell the webmasters you will provide content with the consideration that you receive a bi-line that tells webs visitors where they can purchase your eBooks. Most webmasters will respond favorably to your offer.

5. Look up e-zines that fit your eBook genre. An e-zine is a newsletter that all the great websites offer to their visitors. E-zine editors are ALWAYS looking for articles.

E-mail a proposal to the e-zine editor and offer to submit an article or free chapter of your eBook.

You may even offer the e-zine editor non-exclusive serial rights to post a chapter for each issue in exchange for an advertisement in the e-zine.

You will offer the free information in exchange for links to your eBook store or your unique eBook Internet URL.

6. Contact your local newspaper and give them a similar offer.

7. Contact the editors of association newsletters that focus on your subject area. Make the newsletter editors the same offer. Association members have computers. They have the ability to purchase and read your eBooks.

8. Ask about speaking to the group on your topic. In exchange for speaking have handouts ready that include complete ordering instructions on how each member can order your eBook from Mightywords and other eBook order fulfilling websites.

9. Offer to teach a class based on your eBook at a community college. Make your eBook the required textbook. Print it out and put it into a binder. Set a price and get it into the college bookstore.

10. Read everything you can on marketing books and eBooks over the Internet. Create a marketing plan and do at least 3 eBook marketing activities each day.

Always believe in yourself. Your efforts will pay off with persistence. As you talk to other people about your newly published eBook, your friends, co-workers and relatives will give you valuable insights on other free eBook selling opportunities.

Lets give our Traffic Snowball a little push!

So now you have completed the design of your website and you have uploaded the content to your server. The next step is to bring traffic to the website by announcing to the world that your site is live through search engine submission. This should be considered the first little push that we are giving your traffic snowball.

With a rapid increase in the number of web sites competing for exposure, the role of online search engines and directories is becoming critical to any websites success. Eighty seven percent (87%) of web site visitors find their chosen site through search engines.

What’s more, almost all of them use just seven - namely AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, LookSmart, Google, Hotbot and above all, Yahoo

This means that if you don’t have a top listing on these engines, thousands of potential clients will never find you.

There are 3 steps involved in search engine submission
1) Optimization of your web site
2) Submission of your site to the search engines and directories
3) Monitoring of your listings

Lets deal first with Optimization

The website needs to be made “search engine-friendly” before it is submitted to the major search engines This is an art in itself and there are specialist companies, such as Traffic Builder Systems, that deal only in Search engine optimization and rank management.

The first step that is undertaken is to determine the keywords that are relevant to your website.

Some people achieve a top 10 placement in a major search engine and get plenty of traffic. Others do the same but get nothing.

Why?

Simple. The first group selected keywords that many people are searching on, and the second did not!

To find the optimum keywords that are going to bring you the most targeted traffic you could use a tool such as Wordtracker

Wordtracker will compile a database of terms that people search for. You enter some keywords, and they tell you how often people search for them, and also tell you how many competing sites use those keywords. Wordtracker helps you find all keyword combinations that bear any relation to your business or service - many of which you might never have considered. You’ll find out how popular these keywords really are. Then for each major search engine, they will show you the chances of making the top 10.

Once you have got the correct keywords together you will need to format them into META TAGS to place into the HTML of your webpages

If you are going to submit your site to the search engines individually it must be sensitized with META tags.

There are three META tags used by the popular search engines. META tags are added to your website’s HTML coding, and do not appear on your visible webpage. These tags are placed within the head portion of your HTML document, usually directly beneath your tag.

1) The “Keyword” META Tag

The “keyword” META tag helps meta capable search engines in indexing your website. It tells the search engine under which search terms your website should come up under.

Here is an example of this tag:
<META NAME=”keywords” content=”widgets, cheap widgets, widgets for sale, john store etc..”>

Within this META tag, use your prioritized list of keywords and commanding combinations. Don’t duplicate your keywords too many times. Each keyword should be separated by a comma, and there should be no spaces. Different search engines allow different numbers of keywords. Make sure all keywords listed in your META tag are related to your site.

If you put unrelated keywords in your keyword META tag, some search engines may penalize you or refuse to list you. Be careful not to put competitors’ company names, product names or trademarked names in your META tags. Some companies have sued because they found their names in the META tags of their competitors.

2) The “Description” META Tag

The “description” META tag helps meta capable search engines to summarize your website.

Here is an example of this tag:
<META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”John’s widget shop has the largest and cheapest selection of widgets”>

Within this tag, use a description of your website and keep the tag length under 200 characters. Some search engines allow longer or shorter descriptions. Put the most important part of your description first, for cases where search engines do not use all of it.

Some search engines extract your website’s summary from the first 250 characters of your webpage, so be sure you include a good opening paragraph on your webpage. Make sure everything in your description is related to your site. If you put unrelated words or phrases or sentences in your description META tag, some search engines may penalize you or refuse to list you.

As discussed above, be careful not to put competitors’ company names, product names or trademarked names in your META tags.

3) The “Robots” META Tag

The “robots” META tag tells meta capable search engines which pages should get indexed, and which pages should not. You may have certain pages which you may not want to show up in the search engines. You may have test pages, private pages created for a particular customer, and so on.

If you have a frames site, you wouldn’t want to index your HTML documents which display within the various frames which make up your page.

The following options are available for this tag: all, none, index, noindex, follow, nofollow.

If you wanted all of your pages indexed, you would use this tag on your main page:
<META NAME=”robots” CONTENT=”all follow”>

It would tell the search engine spider to index your main page, then follow any links it finds on that page, and spider those links.

Use this tag on a page which you don’t want indexed:
<META NAME=”robots” CONTENT=”noindex”>

After entering the META tags into the HTML of your website pages and then uploading to the server, you will then need to proceed to the search engines to submit your website.

Doorway pages

Most people optimize each of their webpages for all of their keywords, and to be submitted to all the major search engines. For less popular keywords this strategy will often suffice. However for competitive keywords it won’t get favorable listings, mainly because when you overly fine tune a webpage to score well for one search engine, it will likely score lower for other search engine. For competitive keywords you should consider using a “multiple entry page” strategy.

This involves using multiple entry pages (also called doorway pages, bridge pages, jump pages and gateway pages), each optimized for a particular keyword and/or search engine. Entry pages act as “front doors” to your website. These special pages are designed to score high in keyword density and relevance.

Each entry pages can be fine tuned for one or a few keywords, and can be fine tuned for a particular search engine. It is not advisable to use the above page naming convention with all search engines, as certain search engines may detect that you are using multiple doorways.

To be safe use names which do not resemble one another: The second step is the submission to the search engines

You have the following options:

1) Submit your site manually to the search engines by visiting each one individually. This can be very time consuming and also there is the problem that every search engine is different in the sense that they each use different logarithms for analyze and ranking the website submission.

2) The submission service will submit your website to many hundreds of search engines and directories on a regular basis. This is usually an automated process, with the drawback being you get no advice on optimization. You may or may not receive reports charting your success.

3) The meta-tag optimisers will take your site and optimize it for a one off fee. They may also offer a service to submit the site once it has been optimized. With this service you have little idea of how successful the service has been long after your money has gone.

4) A small number of companies are taking a Search Engine Rank Management approach. This involves the specialist company taking complete, ongoing control of your search engine marketing needs by optimizing, submitting and monitoring your ranking activity on an ongoing basis.

High search engine ranking is the key to unlocking the true potential of your company’s web site.
Based on our industry leading knowledge of search engine technology, Traffic Builder Systems brings you Traffic Builder, an affordable rank management solution for all web site owners.

Finally, the choice is yours but remember that search engine promotion is fundamental to your success and should be the start of the the initial push to get noticed. Investment in good search engine promotion will pay dividends later.

Here is how pay per click programs work. As a advertiser, you bid the price of the keywords you are willing to pay for visitors to come in. As a publisher, you receive the amount of bidded price less the charges by the program owner that supplies you with this facility. In short:

Advertisers : Bid on a specific keyword that he is willing to pay when a visitor clicks on to be directed to a specific site
Publishers : Receive profit less the amount charged by program owner when someone clicks on an advertisement from advertiser. The advertisement would be located at the publisher’s site

Here are a few giant sites for PPC:

THE BIG ONES
Google Adwords and Adsense
Yahoo (Formerly Overture)
Miva (Formerly Findwhat & Espotting)
Adbrite

THE SMALLER ONES
Search123
enHance
SearchFeed
GoClick
7Search
Findit-Quick
Looksmart
Kanoodle

For Google, Adwords is for advertisers and Adsense is for publishers. Google will split the earnings with the publishers which a specific advertisement is clicked. However, Google never reveals the percentage of the sharing with his publishers.

For example, let’s say you are the publisher and you site is about dogs. You would have to put a code snippet into your site as a publisher. Once you have done that, Google will place all the advertisement form the advertisers about dogs (dog care, types of dogs, dogs for sale etc). Let’s say a particular advertiser is paying $1.00 per click and Google shares 50% of the commission with you. You would be receiving $0.50 for that particular click. If you want to know more about Adsense, you can click here

1. Sign for a yahoo ID… you can do this in my.yahoo.com. DO NOT check de automatically create an Email address

2. Clear ALL cookies

3. Activate mail account at cn.mail.yahoo.com
(you get 100Mb storage first *don’t worry*), den sign-out

NOTE: FYI, de two boxes in de activation page is lastname and firstname

Upgradin’ to 1Gb Yahoo China Account

1. Sign-in to Yahoo Messenger, add a contact, sign-out

2. Go back to cn.mail.yahoo.com (all pages would be in Chinese)

3. Click de 1G orange label (graphic) *look at de lower right of de page*

4. Type-in your Yahoo ID and Password *look at de bottom of de page*

5. You’ll go to two more Chinese pages (Just click de bottom centered label in de page)

6. Tadah!! Your upgraded to 1Gig and your default is En’lish with Free POP3

There’s no pesky graphic or flash ads at de moment… but your email add would be username[at]yahoo.com.cn

I think that’s good enough for people without Gmail

Found out a really cool way to get cool music without p2p progs or HTTP/FTP sites. Best thin’ of all: NO QUEUES, NO PASSWORDS.

Here it is:

1.Get Yahoo Messenger [BETA] here:

CODE
download.yahoo.com/dl/installs/msgr6suite.exe

2.Wait for it to download,den run it and let it download anoder 5 MB or so.

3.Get FairStar MP3 Recorder here:

CODE
www.shareordie.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=9754

After testin’ Total Recorder and anoder prog,de FairStar product is de best RECORDING MP3s from a source, in our case de INTERNET RADIO.

4.Fire up LAUNCHcastRadion in Yahoo Messenger [BETA] and choose a station or a genre.

5.Start up FairStart MP3 Recorder,go to Record Options and CHECK autosettin’,go to Encoder-MP3 and UN-CHECK enable VBR and choose 128 or 192 KBs.Also make sure you choose your OUTPUT folder and you’re done.

6.Hit record or whatever and away you go.

Free World Dialup - www.freeworlddialup.com and sign up to get your FWD # and password.
2 - Download brands.xten.net/x-litefwd/download/X-LiteFWD_Install.exe FWD/X-Lite (”self-configures”) program or go to www.myphonebooth.com/ to call any FWD # and U.S. toll free #s usin’ Internet Explorer (Firefox not supported).

Quickstart Guide: www.freeworlddialup.com/support/quick_start_guide

FWD Xlite Configuration Guide:

www.freeworlddialup.com/support/configuration_guide/configure_your_fwd_certified_phone/fwd_xlite/all
MS Windows Messenger Configuration Guide: pulver.com/fwd/fwd30news.html#messenger (FWD supports Windows Messenger 4.6/4.7 but not MSN Messenger 5.x.)

3 - To call a U.S. landline/cell #, dial *+areacode+7digit#. (This FWD feature is not listed on deir website, but has been workin’ for several months now.)

4 - To call a FWD # from a PSTN (your regular phone), click
www.dslreports.com/r0/download/476274~3ccc4c9edbe2a596714a4fd9da897204/fwdaccessnumbers.zip or after you’ve signed up go to FWD web page, click on “Features”, “Access #s” for a list of FWD access numbers in your area. Available in several states in de U.S., UK, NL and DE at this time.

Packet8:

– To call a P8 phone # from a FWD phone: Dial **898 + 1 + P8 number to be routed to P8 service.
– To call a FWD # from a P8 phone:
*If de FWD # you are callin’ contains 5 digits, start to dial with de prefix 0351. For example: 035112345
*If de FWD # you are callin’ contains 6 digits, start to dial with de prefix 0451.

Call UK:

Get a UK telephone # that will call you on your FWD #. Register fwd.calluk.com.

FWD Features: Some features like Voice email needs to be activated at www.fwdnet.net

Internet Callin’
Call Waitin’
CallerID
Missed Call notification
Call Forwardin’
Call Transfer
Three Way Callin’
Voice email
SoftPhone, IP Phones & *Web-based
Aliases
Whitepages directory
ENUM Entry
eDial SOAP
Conferencin’
Instant Messagin’
Web Callin’/FWD-Talk
Corporate Cisco Call Manager Connection
Callin’ to Toll Free Numbers in de UK, US, NL, JP and FR TellMe Service (411).
– NL Dial *31(800)… to reach Nederlands toll free #s.
– UK Dial *44(800)… or *44(808)… or *44 (500) to reach UK toll free #s.
– US Dial *1(8xx) xxx xxxx to reach United States toll free #s.
– JP Dial *81 0120… to reach Japan toll free #s.

Frequently used numbers
613 Echo test
55555 Volunteer Welcome Line
514 FWD Coffee House
612 Time
411 TellMe Information
611 Part Time Technical support
511 FWD Conference Bridge

At de moment, I think this is way better than Skype, Yahoo IM voice chat, etc…I’ve been usin’ FWD for over a year with my cable broadband service and didn’t have to set up any port forwardin’ on my broadband router. Obviously you’ld need a mic/speakers connected to your PC.

You can also use your regular telephone via an adapter voipstore.pulver.com/product_info.php?products_id=32 and IP phone voipstore.pulver.com/product_info.php?products_id=33. Adapters and IP phones from different vendors like Cisco are available.

* Broadbandreports.com VoIP forum (formerly known as DSLReports.com)
– If you have any questions or just curious about VoIP, visit de VoIP forum www.dslreports.com/forum/voip at DSLReports.com.

Trackin’ email back to its source: Twisted Evil
cause i hate spammers… Evil or Very Mad

Ask most people how dey determine who sent them an email message and de response is almost universally, “By de From line.” Unfortunately this symptomatic of de current confusion amon’ internet users as to where particular messages come from and who is spreadin’ spam and viruses. The “From” header is little more than a courtesy to de person receivin’ de message. People spreadin’ spam and viruses are rarely courteous. In short, if dere is any question about where a particular email message came from de safe bet is to assume de “From” header is forged.

So how do you determine where a message actually came from? You have to understand how email messages are put togeder in order to backtrack an email message. SMTP is a text based protocol for transferrin’ messages across de internet. A series of headers are placed in front of de data portion of de message. By examinin’ de headers you can usually backtrack a message to de source network, sometimes de source host. A more detailed essay on readin’ email headers can be found.

If you are usin’ Outlook or Outlook Express you can view de headers by right clickin’ on de message and selectin’ properties or options.

Below are listed de headers of an actual spam message I received. I’ve changed my email address and de name of my server for obvious reasons. I’ve also double spaced de headers to make them more readable.

Return-Path: <s359dyxtt@yahoo.com>

X-Original-To: davar@example.com

Delivered-To: davar@example.com

Received: from 12-218-172-108.client.mchsi.com (12-218-172-108.client.mchsi.com [12.218.172.108])
by mailhost.example.com (Postfix) with SMTP id 1F9B8511C7
for <davar@example.com>; Sun, 16 Nov 2003 09:50:37 -0800 (PST)

Received: from (HELO 0udjou) [193.12.169.0] by 12-218-172-108.client.mchsi.com with ESMTP id <536806-74276>; Sun, 16 Nov 2003 19:42:31 +0200

Message-ID: <n5-l067n7z$46-z$-n@eo2.32574>

From: “Maricela Paulson” <s359dyxtt@yahoo.com>

Reply-To: “Maricela Paulson” <s359dyxtt@yahoo.com>

To: davar@example.com

Subject: STOP-PAYING For Your PAY-PER-VIEW, Movie Channels, Mature Channels…isha

Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2003 19:42:31 +0200

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Accordin’ to de From header this message is from Maricela Paulson at s359dyxxt@yahoo.com. I could just fire off a message to abuse@yahoo.com, but that would be waste of time. This message didn’t come from yahoo’s email service.

The header most likely to be useful in determinin’ de actual source of an email message is de Received header. Accordin’ to de top-most Received header this message was received from de host 12-218-172-108.client.mchsi.com with de ip address of 21.218.172.108 by my server mailhost.example.com. An important item to consider is at what point in de chain does de email system become untrusted? I consider anythin’ beyond my own email server to be an unreliable source of information. Because this header was generated by my email server it is reasonable for me to accept it at face value.

The next Received header (which is chronologically de first) shows de remote email server acceptin’ de message from de host 0udjou with de ip 193.12.169.0. Those of you who know anythin’ about IP will realize that that is not a valid host IP address. In addition, any hostname that ends in client.mchsi.com is unlikely to be an authorized email server. This has every sign of bein’ a cracked client system.

Here’s is where we start diggin’. By default Windows is somewhat lackin’ in network diagnostic tools; however, you can use de tools at to do your own checkin’.

davar@nqh9k:[/home/davar] $whois 12.218.172.108

AT&T WorldNet Services ATT (NET-12-0-0-0-1)
12.0.0.0 - 12.255.255.255
Mediacom Communications Corp MEDIACOMCC-12-218-168-0-FLANDREAU-MN (NET-12-218-168-0-1)
12.218.168.0 - 12.218.175.255

# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2003-12-31 19:15
# Enter ? for additional hints on searchin’ ARIN’s WHOIS database.

I can also verify de hostname of de remote server by usin’ nslookup, although in this particular instance, my email server has already provided both de IP address and de hostname.

davar@nqh9k:[/home/davar] $nslookup 12.218.172.108

Server: localhost
Address: 127.0.0.1

Name: 12-218-172-108.client.mchsi.com
Address: 12.218.172.108

Ok, whois shows that Mediacom Communications owns that netblock and nslookup confirms de address to hostname mappin’ of de remote server,12-218-172-108.client.mchsi.com. If I preface a www in front of de domain name portion and plug that into my web browser, www.mchsi.com, I get Mediacom’s web site.

There are few thin’s more embarrassin’ to me than firin’ off an an’ry message to someone who is supposedly responsible for a problem, and bein’ wron’. By double checkin’ who owns de remote host’s IP address usin’ two different tools (whois and nslookup) I minimize de chance of makin’ myself look like an idiot.

A quick glance at de web site and it appears dey are an ISP. Now if I copy de entire message includin’ de headers into a new email message and send it to abuse@mchsi.com with a short message explainin’ de situation, dey may do somethin’ about it.

But what about Maricela Paulson? There really is no way to determine who sent a message, de best you can hope for is to find out what host sent it. Even in de case of a PGP signed messages dere is no guarantee that one particular person actually pressed de send button. Obviously determinin’ who de actual sender of an email message is much more involved than readin’ de From header. Hopefully this example may be of some use to oder forum regulars.