Then I ran across SpamStopsHere.com. There are many services out there for outsourced spam and virus filtering, but I liked the pitch of SpamStopsHere, and I liked the friendly pricing they had for family domains. $12.50 a month or $125 a year for both spam filtering and virus filtering on up to 10 mailboxes (or 50,000 messages per day). Fits the bill nicely.

Yes, there are “free” solutions out there, but I like the idea of paying for a service that is useful. Once you pay, you can raise your expectation levels that the service will work properly, and continue to be around down the road. With free services, there’s no guarantee of a level of service, nor a guarantee that they’ll be there in 3 months. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure these types of services start off with the best of intentions, but it costs money to provide quality and reliability. I’m OK paying for that.

The way this service works is pretty straightforward. After activating your account, you point the DNS MX records for your domain to their mail servers, and then they forward your scanned and filtered mail on to your mail server. Simple as that.

I “installed” their service around 6:00pm last Sunday, and in the 48 hours since then they have filtered over 60,000 spam messages. You read that right, 60,000. Spam literally has stopped dead on my mailbox. Where I was once getting several hundred per day (on my mailbox alone, not to mention the rest of my family), I now get 0.

That’s the kind of dramatic effect I was hoping for, but honestly, I was anticipating something less. I like being pleasantly surprised.

One of the problems I’ve had to deal with regarding spam is “reply-to storms.” This is where a spammer decides to use your email address as the “reply-to” on the spam they’re sending out to other people. That way, when/if their server rejects the message, it sends it back to you instead of the spammer. I was getting these “storms” about once a week, where literally thousands of email messages would come in in a matter of minutes. In some cases the load was so overwhelming that it acted like a denial of service attack, crashing my machine. Since SpamStopsHere has a distributed inbound SMTP infrastructure, they can easily withstand the storms, and since they’re doing the filtering, I never see the traffic. My server is breathing much more easily now. Whereas I would regularly see 100 Postfix SMTP tasks running on my server, now I see 3 or 4.

Another cool side benefit of the service is store and forward queueing. Should my server ever go down or become unreachable, SpamStopsHere will simply queue my incoming “good” mail, and try to deliver it until my server comes back up.

So far so good. I hope the service continues to live up to what I’ve seen in the first 2 days. Give them a try: www.spamstopshere.com.

Mind you, we’ll still be in “beta”. We’ve still got lots to do, bugs to squash, features to complete and roll out, etc. Lots of stuff to make Viewzi an even better, more fun way to search.

It’s been quite a ride at this point, and I only expect it to speed up. As a team, we’re really starting to get our legs under us and start hitting on all cylinders. And the feedback we’ve been receiving is quite flattering; very positive and constructive. We didn’t expect as many people to “get it” as apparently have over the past 5 or 6 weeks, and it’s really great to hear. We’re very excited about where the product is headed, and anxious to show the world what we’ve been working so hard on.

Well, 71 hours to go (really less, more about that later). Back to work.

Viewzi. Changing the way you look at Search.

And we got hammered.

Within 15 minutes of the story on the 10:00, we had received several hundred new user accounts, and the queue manager for the screen capture subsystem was smoking. Almost literally. It never crashed, but it bogged down quite a bit and is still working out from under the deluge.

I’m in the middle of rewriting the queue manager (the part of the code that delegates screen capture tasks to the many servers we have capturing website images), but I haven’t finished it yet and rolled it into production. So, we’re still running on the old code, which is having a hard time keeping up. I think the architectural changes I’ve made to the system will allow it to scale much more gracefully, but right now it’s kinda falling on it’s face.

The rest of the system has held up beautifully, though. For a little while there we were executing almost 35,000 SQL queries a minute, and the database server hardly broke a sweat. The rest of the architecture is sound. But screen capturing is a nasty business. Once we roll out the new code, we should be able to literally have hundreds of screen capture servers running to keep up with the load.

The feedback has been very good, overwhelmingly positive, and we’re still seeing new users sign up at a faster clip than we have since we went on the air about 5 weeks ago. It’s pretty exciting, and crazy at the same time. I just hope I have a little more time to work the kinks out before we hit the national news.

What is Viewzi? We’re building the next generation of visual search. It’s hard to explain in text, so go take a look at our site and see:
http://www.viewzi.com
There’s even a little movie to explain the whole thing.

What’s a private beta? Well, we’re not quite ready to accept the deluge of traffic from the world just yet; we’re still building great functionality and ironing out all the kinks. But we wanted to get a bunch of people trying out the system, so we’ve created an invite program. If you’d like to try out Viewzi for yourself, click on the “Try Viewzi” ticket on the main site, and enter the referral code “steve” (no quotes). The system will send you an email confirmation and then let you into the system so you can try out Viewzi for yourself.

I’d really like to know what you think, so post feedback (either from within the site itself or here).

Go here: http://www.siteadvisor.com/quizzes/phishing_0707/

And if you don’t know what a Phishing scam is, you should after the quiz.

I’ve since gone to Akismet spam checking, and it’s working pretty well… no false positives yet, and no false negatives either… but the amount of attempts is bewildering. It’s already filtered over 250 spam comments.

Don’t even get me started on email spam. I get, easily, 250 spams a day through my various email accounts. Fortunately, Apple Mail does a pretty decent job of catching those as well. However, I still get 10 or so false negatives a day and the occasional false positive. This means I have to continuously sift thru the sludge to make sure I didn’t miss an important email, which has happened. I used to have a pretty good server-based spam catcher, but it started randomly crashing my SMTP server, so I had to abandon it.

The thing that makes me slap my forehead is the fact that spammers wouldn’t continue their flood of garbage if they didn’t receive some sort of return. That means that some (albeit small) percentage of people out there are actually dumb enough to fall for their pitch and follow the link. It’s pretty simple, folks: if they have to resort to such low-life ways of getting their message out, their message is not worth hearing, and is most likely a scam of some sort.

I know sending emails is a relatively cheap way to get the word out, but even so, I’ve got to think that if the click-thru rate on this spam went to zero, the spam would dry up.

I think what is needed is some sort of authenticated email system. The ability to send anonymous email over SMTP is entirely too easy. If people had to attach their true, authenticated identity to each email they sent, things would be much more above board. Shine the light and the cockroaches tend to scatter. I can’t think of hardly any scenarios where true anonymous email is necessary, can you? In the rare case where it might be, there is probably a different channel available for that communication.

A little “inside baseball” here… I own my own server, but co-locate the server at a hosting facility here in Dallas. I run my own services on it (www, mail, etc.) but do not run DNS (i.e. Bind) on it. Not out of the ordinary at all.

Until today at 9:30PM, I’ve had my DNS services hosted with a company called NameSecure (www.namesecure.com). For the past two years, they’ve been just fine. No hiccups, easy web interface to make changes, just peachy. In fact, they’ve worked so well for that, I even moved a handful of domains over to my account there, and paid up thru 2009 for their services.

A week or so ago, I agreed to host a personal site for a buddy of mine, and went over to NameSecure to add a new hostname to my business domain. When I committed the changes, I happened to notice that the page said that even though I had paid for the service, NameSecure was not the primary host for my DNS services for that domain. That was confusing in and of itself, but I knew something was up when after a couple of hours the new hostname wasn’t resolving. So I opened a support ticked saying essentially, “what’s up?”

Two days later, I receive a reply stating that NameSecure is not the Registrar of the domain. To which I replied: “I know, this has nothing to do with that, I simply wanted to update the parameters of the service I paid you to perform.” A little bit more lengthy than that, but you get the gist.

The next day I received a reply stating “We’re sorry you’re having problems with your mail service. We’re having technical difficulties, but we think the problem has been resolved already. Thanks.”

Geez. This has nothing to do with mail. And, no, the problem hasn’t been resolved. Another email off to support.

SIX days later I get a reply that states (I’m paraphrasing here) “Hmmm… seems like when you make changes, they’re not being pushed out to the rest of the Internet. Not sure what to do, so I’m going to escalate this to engineering.” Wow. What was your first clue? OK, escalation, that sounds good. Maybe someone with half a clue will take a look.

So that brings us up to today. Six additional days later. I get a message this morning at 7:35AM that my DNS zone files have been rebuilt and submitted to the zone controllers, which update on odd hours. This sounds good, I say to myself, and go on about my day.

About two hours later, I’m at a client’s office and I try to retrieve my email… only to find out that my powerbook can’t find the server. Hmmm… I drop out to the terminal and try to ping my box. No dice. I ping the IP address directly and it answers fine. I dig the domain for my server and see that now the nameservers aren’t serving any useful hosts for my domains. Great.

I immediately go to NameSecure’s website and attempt to locate a phone number. Nothing. My only means of communication with them is via a web support form. I fill out my support request, marking it as an emergency and shoot it into the ether. I then do a Google search for a phone number and turn up a 570 number. I call it and get a polite recording stating that they don’t take support calls any longer, followed by a click. Wonderful.

A couple hours pass and I haven’t heard word one from them. No call, and (of course) no email, since my server can’t be reached at this point. So I fire off web support ticket #2, this time using a gmail account as the return address. I get a email back from the system letting me know that someone will get to it as soon as possible, hopefully in the next 24 hours. Meanwhile, my server is unreachable.

By the end of the day, nothing word from NameSecure, so I fire one more urgent message at them, and then immediately locate a new DNS host. I had stuff going on tonight, so I couldn’t get back to the issue until I got home around 9:00, but 20 or so minutes later I had DNS hosting up and running at my new DNS host (DNSPark, and had Network Solutions pointing to their nameservers. By 11:00 everything is resolving perfectly and mail is starting to flow again.

And one click from their home page and I find not only a phone number, but a street address. Something tells me this is going to work out better. They even have a backup email service that takes over if your primary mail server is unreachable, queueing mail to be sent on down the line if your server temporarily goes down (or becomes unreachable).

Hopefully, if you tried to send me mail today, it’s queued up and will get to me eventually. If it bounced, please resend it.

And avoid NameSecure. My next step is to try to get my service fees back from them, but something tells me I’ll be unsuccessful.

I just flipped over to foxnews.com this morning and was a little shocked to see the new design… it literally looks like the stylesheet didn’t come down with the content. I had to refresh a couple of times to be sure. There are serious rendering issues (both with the home page and story pages) in browsers other than IE/Win (Firefox on both PC/Mac as well as Safari on Mac), many links do not work (over half the main menu bar, besides rendering half-wrapped, doesn’t allow clicks), text is cut off in strange places, etc. Overall, the site design looks incomplete and unfinished, not to mention untested in anything other than IE/Win. Even on that single platform the design doesn’t look complete, making the user think the whole page hasn’t loaded.

I’m sure you have statistics that indicate that the majority of your readership use IE/Win still, but other, much more standards compliant browsers are increasing in popularity, and with IE7 is released, this design will probably be broken there as well. The prior foxnews.com design was very consistent across browsers and platforms. This one looks rushed into production.

“totally new”? yes. “crisp”? not so much.

Please reconsider.

Yours,
Steve DeVoll
Plano, TX

As I told them, I did try the new design in a number of browsers both on Mac and PC. Internet Explorer 6 for Windows was the only browser that came close to rendering a complete design, or at least what I can infer they were going for. The rest were jumbled, had cut off or overlapping areas, or parts of the page that just didn’t work.

Completely unacceptable in this day and age for a major website to not even come close to rendering properly in Firefox, much less other CSS2 compliant browsers.

Of course, part of the problem can probably be attributed to the massive amounts of doubleclick supplied advertising on the site. It’s hard to say where the site ends and the advertising picks up… it’s all squashed together.

Ugh.