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INTERACTIVE AGENCY
Posts Aboutemail
More Cool Finds on the Interwebz
Here are some of the cool things we’ve found online recently:
- Contxts.com
Business cards are so 2007. What with the environment in shambles do you really want to be that guy who is handing out chopped up pieces of bleached trees? Contxts.com lets you share your information via SMS! - Mozy.com
An online backup service for consumers and small businesses. Back up all of your personal files, photos, music, etc. automatically online. Worry free! - SnapaBug.com
Help widget for customer service chat on web sites. - RealTime Inline Validation article on GetElastic
Realtime in-line form validation to improve conversions and avoid shopping cart abandonment.
Social Obligations
On the drive into work today, I was listening to “This Week in Google“, one of the amazing podcasts from the TWiT network, hosted by Leo Laporte. In the most recent episode, one of the guests spoke briefly about how he felt that he could let non-direct Twitter messages and Facebook wall posts to him go without reply, but he felt obliged to respond to emails and direct messages. This got me thinking about the “Social Obligation” that I feel with various forms of communication.
GMail/Google Calendar Integration
Google, why hast thou forsaken us? A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, GMail had this great feature that was a defining reason in my switch from my previous mail provider (me). That was that if you ever got a message that had any sort of “event” — various combinations of a date, time and place — gmail would detect it and automatically create a link on the right sidebar to “Add to calendar”.
No it’s not personal but at least its not spam
You know what I am talking about - all those email lists you have signed up for but you never read them. You even have a separate email account just for that. You had to get those offers for that weekend trip to Las Vegas you will never have enough time to go to or for some reason you wanted to get alerts when a friend posts a survey on your Facebook page as it happens.
Less e-mail, more cowbell please!
Long ago and in a far away land at a startup firm, there were impromptu celebrations of a new client relationship with the ringing of a cowbell, followed by a boom box playback of “Grazing In the Grass”, an instrumental by South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela. There was really no significance in the cowbell or the song itself, other than taking the time to celebrate a successful milestone where hard work, talent and tenacity paid off.
Over time, the culture changed from outward to inward as the endless meetings, recaps, IMs and emails started infringing on productivity. A team of twenty quickly mushroomed to over three hundred team members with a corresponding exponential deluge of e-mails.
Blacklists: What they are and how to avoid them
If you thought that anti-spam protection for your incoming mail would alleviate your e-mail problems forever, think again – another issue that can cause more than a few headaches are DNS BlackLists (DNSBLs), sometimes also called RBLs (Realtime Black List). DNSBLs are not a new idea, but their usage is increasing rapidly. In short, a DNSBL is an innovative use of DNS to provide access to lists of IP addresses (or other info). These lists are created on varying criteria — for example, the IP address was caught sending spam, or it’s owned by a company known for supporting/sending spam. Or perhaps the IP address hosts a mailserver not following the rules, or a web/proxy server that has been compromised in such a way that it could be used to send spam. In this way, common sources of spam can be compiled into these lists and checked by a mailserver before accepting mail. If you show up in the blacklist, your mail is rejected.
As the spam-war has escalated, DNSBLs have become a double-edged sword. They have probably saved SMTP from being utterly inundated with spam to the point that it’s useless. However, blacklists have also been forced to get increasingly aggressive. It’s not uncommon for an organization to find itself blacklisted, even if it didn’t overtly send spam (that it knows of). If your organization becomes the unlucky member of a DNSBL, you’ll find that most (if not all) of your email is rejected by the outside world because you’re now considered a spammer. The worst part is that you may have no idea why you were blacklisted and no idea how to get de-listed!
