The story is over on our CEO's blog: Small Town, Big Ideas : Capital Raising: The Story Behind the Story.
We were in a local paper as well: The Roanoke Times.
And just to reiterate an important fact from both links: we have been cash flow positive for some time now and growing like mad especially for the last 18 months or so. Unlike the dot-com-bubble days, investors are looking for actual returns on investment!
-Kirk
I was shown an email today that talked about the creation of a 411 lookup service for cell phones and a big rush in cell phone telemarketing that would follow. The email encouraged readers to sign up for the federal government's Do Not Call registry by dialing a phone number.
Fact Mingled With Fiction
Yes, there really is a cell phone 411 service being created. Yes, the federal government has a registry of phone numbers that most telemarketers are required to avoid.
But...
The 411 service is being built for consumers and does not support telemarketing. It is like 411 for regular phones: call and ask for a person by name and area to get a phone number.
The national Do Not Call registry is only for home phones. We can all hope that if cell phone telemarketing ever begins in earnest that the registry will allow cell phone numbers to be listed, too.
Read more at snopes.com and urbanlegends.about.com.
-Kirk
Here is an article with a lot of interesting facts and figures about viruses in 2004: CRN.
I won't ruin the article, but a lot more viruses caused problems, the average time it took to recover became longer, and (not suprisingly) costs to recover went up.
I'll renew my earlier recommendation that multiple layers of anti-virus protection be used whenever possible. Putting two anti-virus programs on the same computer is generally not a good idea, but protecting servers-- and particularly email servers-- as well as regular desktop machines should be standard practice.
Some Anti-virus Programs
There are some anti-virus programs that are free for noncommercial use (see their sites for definitions). Here are three that I have tried at various times:
Avast! free home edition
Antivir personal edition
AVG free edition
There are *way* too many commercial anti-virus programs for me to track. All of the products above have corresponding commercial programs, but here are a few more for small businesses:
McAfee
Symantec
Panda Software
Trend Micro
F-Prot
We Use
On our email servers we use F-Prot for servers with ClamAV, an open-source anti-virus program that works on Linux. We encourage our customers to use another layer of anti-virus software on their desktops & laptops!
-Kirk
We recently hired a great technical writer to help us with a lot of projects. There are now some new documents at our Setup email client page for Netscape Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird. I really like the new formats we're moving to and hope that we can get the old docs redone within the next couple of months. And keep your eyes open for a Webmail user guide in the next few days.
Outlook Express With IMAP Tip
Outlook Express allows email you send using IMAP to stay synchronized with the Sent folder in Webmail, although this isn't how OE handles sent mail by default. To make the change go to Tools -> Accounts -> Mail (tab) -> Properties -> IMAP (tab). For our email system (or any other system based on courier-imap), put 'Inbox' for the root folder, and 'Sent' and 'Drafts' for the other two folder names below. After clicking OK Outlook Express will take just a moment to reset its folder information.
To make sure that Sent and Drafts stay up to date, right click on each of those folders then choose to synchronize all messages in the folder.
If you want to do the same thing using Outloook, follow these instructions from Microsoft.
-Kirk
I’m not going to blog every time SANS kicks out a slightly elevated threat level. If that’s the sort of thing you *want*, subscribe to their alert feed here.
The subject of the threat is about “DNS Poisoning”. I wrote about pharming (which is the cool way to say DNS poisoning) a couple of weeks ago. But the gist of the alert from the SANS folks is that there are some very specific attacks against certain DNS Servers (not clients) going on right now and that it has been building over the course of about a month.
Amazement & Dismay
When I read about these sorts of things I have an internal dialogue with two conflicting viewpoints. First, how the heck has the Internet, by-and-large, not had any big problems with Bad People hijacking DNS servers? Second, how the heck can big-name vendors be sending out products with such serious security problems?
What can you & I do?
Probably nothing. We use UNIX-based DNS here so we’re not considered vulnerable by SANS.
If you happen to be Windows or Symantec Gateway administrator, please be sure your software is patched to the latest specs and configured in a secure way. Here is a guide to securing Windows 2000 DNS. Here is some info from Symantec about issues with their products.
-Kirk
I’ve been reading a lot over the last few weeks about “customer evangelists”, “citizen marketers”, and the like. The basic thrust of the reading has been about turning happy customers into folks who will go out and shout to the world about how great your company is.
Partly I think this is great because by definition you have to be making a lot of customers happy before you’ll reach the few who will really make some waves in your behalf. And while I believe that there is good intent behind the discussions, part of it seems disingenuous. Forced, almost. Maybe I'm just jaded.
Webmail.us Testimonials
There were a lot of things that I liked about Webmail.us before I started here. Not least of which was a great page full of testimonials. I remember reading the one from MacGurus.com where they talked about actually being kicked off of other email providers because their domain was the victim of so much spam. Between that and the demo, I knew that the basic product was excellent.
We have an unofficial policy about testimonials here: if someone sends us an email to support thanking us profusely for our help, we ask if they would be willing to contribute a testimonial. If they send one in, I proofread it. I make minor spelling and wording changes and have a web developer post it. Fairly simple & we try not to force someone to feel something if they haven’t already expressed a lot of happiness.
Think we ought to do it differently or have a suggestion? Email me!
What Makes A Really Happy Customer
I spent more hours than I care to admit surfing blogs one week not too long ago. I had made a PubSub feed on the words “customer service”. I read through everything it hit—hundreds of items. My goal was to find patterns of root causes of customer’s reactions to customer service experiences. Here is what I can share, in order of importance:
#1 Successfully resolving the problem
#2 Meeting explicit or implied commitments
#3 Responding in a context-appropriate amount of time
Other things like politeness, for example, only seemed to be mentioned if one of these core things stood out as really good or really bad.
So the extremely happy customers come from going beyond the scope of the problem, from exceeding commitments, and from responding more quickly than a customer expected.
We’re working now to make sure we have extremely happy customers!
-Kirk
Today I received a copy of an email that said I would be paid hundreds of dollars if I forwarded the message to a bunch of people. It claimed to be real, to have been on the nightly news, and to have been on a 2-page spread in USA Today.
If only.
My favorite website to visit to check out various myths as fact or fiction is http://www.snopes.com. And I’m sorry: they now have a few ads. Of course, the banner ad they had was for Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel—an awesome show.
Anyway, I’ve used Snopes for years and have found it be to very thorough and accurate. Every now and then, I check something out that I think is a myth and find it to be partly true. Maybe this site will be useful to you, too. It’s fun just to poke around and see what myths are out there!
-Kirk
Here's a good article about the impact of phishing on small businesses: http://www.messagingpipeline.com/159903381.
It includes lots of interesting pie charts with survey results from small businesses.
-Kirk
On Monday of next week there will be a complete press release about this (subscribe to that RSS feed here). But I thought I’d give a little preview to blog readers.
Product Improvement Requests
We love getting product improvement requests! It’s a sign that our customers like our product well enough to give feedback and believe (correctly) that we’re the sort of company who will do what it can to make things better. That being said, some improvement requests people send to us are really bugs that have to be addressed immediately and they are.
But a lot of other fixes and improvments are more optional. We’ve lumped a bunch of these together and are releasing them together as Webmail 3.1.
Fixes and Improvements
One of our biggest requests was to have an easy way to flag a message as spam or as non-spam (good). Now you just view the email and click “Trust Sender” or “Report Spam” and you’re done!
Some other changes are:
· Full support for the Safari web browser on Mac’s
· Small tweaks to improve support on the Firefox and Netscape web browsers
· Speed enhancements
· View plain text attachments inside Webmail
· Shift-click to select multiple emails
· Auto-complete now optional
· More message sorting options
· Better signature customization support
There are more than 30 total fixes and improvements.
When
Well, the 1-click demo will soon be version 3.1 if you just want to give it a quick peek later tonight. On Monday all new mailboxes that are created will default to 3.1 since the changes aren’t all that noticeable for most people. We’ll be moving everyone else to 3.1 over the next month or so.
Testing
We’ve been testing 3.1 internally for quite a while and haven’t had any issues. Our support email account has been using it—high volume with lots of attachments—and things have been good. The speed enhancements really help for users with a lot of email.
Enjoy!
-Kirk
So almost a month ago I sent an email to ILSCorp in response to a domain name scam letter they sent to me. Despite their website's promise of a 2-day turnaround on email, I just received a reply yesterday. Go to my old entry's comment section if you want to read what they sent to me.
[2:24pm] Rather than make you skim past the old post down to the comments, here is what they said:
"ILS is a search engine ranking and submission services firm. We do not provide domain name, web hosting or email services. We apologize for any confusion."
You would think that after waiting 4 weeks for my question to be answered, they could give me more than three sentences. Oh well.
-Kirk
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