Digital Meanderings
Meanderings of a coder

Here is yet another reason to keep personal backups of your online files. Download Thunderbird, set up Outlook, do something to save your email! Google may be a great company, Gmail may be a great service and Firefox may be a great tool but be sure that you have backups. On-site, off-site and on different media. It may seem like a hassle but think of how big your headache will be when your data is lost!

“Gmail users are reporting that all of their emails and contacts are being auto deleted. This may be a security flaw around use of Firefox 2.0. Google
’s official policy is that once emails are deleted, they are gone forever. And based on the Google Groups thread, no one has been able to have their Gmail accounts restored to pre-deletion status.”

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As I’m sure everyone on the Internet is aware, image spam is the latest avenue used by spammers. This type of advertisement uses images instead of words to get the message across. I’m not sure who would buy something that was advertised in some random email that contained oddly worded and oddly formatted pictures but apparently people are.

This type of spam isn’t a problem for me, I just delete it. But more and more often it gets through my spam filters and that is really annoying. I get enough email in a day, I don’t need to spend the extra time looking at spam images. Enter the MXtreme from Bordersoft. This nifty piece of software is used to stop image spam. A wonderful idea! How does it work?

Most spam filters run the image through a program that uses Optical Character Recognition or OCR. Many people are familiar with OCR already - it comes with your scanner so that you can scan a text document and edit using Word or some other word processing program. Anyway, the spam filter will run the image through on OCR program and then run the extracted text through the spam filter. If the words in the image match commonly used spam words, then the email is flagged. This is a great idea except many spammers are now using “captcha” like words to fool the OCR software. The MXtreme isn’t fooled because they invented something called “Interceptâ„¢ Image Analysis” which is a new technique to extract and filter the text included in these images.

I think you should check out this software. I’m a software developer and I had been working on my own solution, but I may just look into this!

This post is a paid advertisement for MXtreme which is used to stop image spam.

“Normally buying noise-isolating earbuds can run you $100 to $200 - but you can make your own high-quality noise-blocking headphones for about $20 by jamming epoxy putty in your ear! Well, it’s a little more refined than that, but that’s the basic idea.”

While this is a pretty interesting idea, I’m not sure how much I’d like jamming epoxy into my ear …

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When PayPerPost first started the blogosphere was abuzz with how wrong it is. People getting paid to write for-pay blog posts and not being allowed to disclose the fact that the post was really an advertisement. Personally, I’ve written a few for-pay posts and I really don’t feel like I was misleading any of my readers.

My rationale for being ok without full disclosure is I wrote my posts about the product. I didn’t really endorse the product itself but I endorsed the idea behind the product. If I thought the idea was good, then I would write the post and accept their money. If I felt the product was bad then I didn’t write anything and didn’t get paid. This may be seen as an ethically gray area, but I think I kept myself pretty clean.

Thankfully PayPerPost has announced on their blog that they are now allowing bloggers to disclose the fact the post is an advertisement. Good news for all the ethicists and PayPerPost-weary bloggers out there!

By the way, this post has been brought to you by PayPerPost.

I can understand the point but wow.  Just wow.

http://www.firearmsandliberty.com/kasler-protection.html

Because of my recent GMail fiasco I’ve been downloading all of my email to my computer. I’ve been able to download most of my messages, in fact I was able to get all of my messages until 9/1/2006. Then the pipe ran dry. Every time I logged into Gmail via Thunderbird the GMail servers would tell me that I had no new messages. After some research I found the GMail POP Troubleshooter.

The GMail POP Troubleshooter checks your Outlook or Thunderbird settings to determine any configuration problems. After running the tool it alerted me to the fact that the “Leave messages on server” setting is invalid as this is GMail default behavior (Help Center - Incorrect ‘leave on server’ setting). I changed the setting and my Gmail messages started downloading again. w00t.

I’ve been a member of the Ars Technica community for a long time. It is a very close and helpful community. It is filled with intelligent and caring people. There are quite a few members with the entrepreneurial spirit and often times other members are happy to throw some business to these people. Often times this works out very well for everyone involved but every once and a while a business comes along that is run by people with really no experience. Such is the case of Aetheri now Leafy Host, a web hosting company started by two members of Ars.

Here a link to the original thread if you care to look. In this post I plan on dissecting it.

In the beginning it seemed like a great service. It was run well and the services were provided at a great price. But two months everything changed. Two months ago they encountered a complete hard drive failure and they lost a lot of data. Not too bad though, every hosting company has backups right?

Although they advertised multiple backups it become very obvious that they were a false promise. There were no backups. The drive needed to be professionally recovered. Instead of sending it out immediately this company decided to try to fix it themselves. They made an image of the drive, or so their customers hope, and began to use the FSCK tool. Apparently this has helped a little but not all the data has been recovered.

The worst part of this fiasco is all of the un-kept and vague promises that were made by the people at Leafy Host. They continuously would say that the drive would be sent “soon.” They promised again and again to send the drive “tomorrow.” As of 12/5 they promised that they would send the drive out on 12/6.

They also would lose contact. In one instance they were out of contact with their customers for a week. Strangely, after an anonymous post was made to one of their girlfriend’s blogs and after a ban was threatened, they made contact again. Before that people called cell phones and left voice mails, sent e-mails and create trouble ticket. Their lack was contact was blamed on a dead cell phone battery, an expired help desk license and a broken email server.

Anyone else think that the operators of Leafy Host have been spewing bull?

Remember folks the kindness of community, and your customers, only goes so far. If you run a business keep the following in mind:

• Communication is extremely important. If a customer sends you an email or leaves you a voice mail - get back to them immediately even it is just to let them know that you received their message.
• Set the expectation. If your customer asks when something is going to be fixed give them an honest answer. If you don’t know or aren’t sure tell the customer so. But do let them know that you will provide them with a better estimate. If you missed the expectation help your customer understand why it happened and how you plan to rectify the matter.
• If you are going to be unreachable, or you are unreachable because server/application issues find a way to get the word out to your customers. I realize this belongs with communication, but I feel this point is very important.
• Do not lie to your customers. When a customer is paying money for a service there is a certain amount of trust implicitly placed on both parties. The customer trusts that the business will care for the their needs and will work hard to fix any problems that arise. The business trusts that the customer will pay them.
• Save your money. Although I could be wrong, I feel the reason why Leafy Host waited so long to send the drive for recovery was because they didn’t have the money to pay for the service. Running a business takes capital and the owners need to eat. This is why a business needs a war chest or a rainy day fund. Businesses need money to help them through the lean times and when the unexpected arises.

I do hope Leafy Host survives and that the operators have learned their lesson. Too bad a teacher from the School of Hard Knocks had to do it but if they learned their lesson then not all is lost.

If you have any comments, suggestions for other business owners or something to add feel free to leave a comment.

2006-12-17 - Editor’s Note: It has come to my attention that I should probably include the aliases that are used by the company in this article. Here they are: Leafy Host, LeafyHost, and Aetheri. If you have anymore, please feel free to post them as a comment.

I’m slowly becoming an Apple Fan Boy (yea I know, I’m disgusted by it too) but their hardware is just so sexy. If they someday come out with a video game system I’d be very tempted to get it - as long as they also have the games to support it.

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