WebValence News

A few customers have asked for features that are available from providers such as Constant Contact. In particular, they are interested in the ability to segment their subscriber list into different groups, and personalize messages to those groups with information about each individual subscriber.

We listened to these comments and have installed the capability to offer these features to our Email broadcast customers. We are calling this ability Email Broadcast Pro.

For more information on pricing and availability, see the services section of our web site.

Notice of system software and host changes for the technically inclined.

Updates applied 3/12/06:

• Updated to MacOS X Server 10.3.9
• Updated to PHP 5.1.2
• Updated to Zend Optimizer to 2.6.2
• Updated Lasso Services to 8.1.5
• Updated LetterRip Services to 4.1.6

Host reconfiguration applied 3/5/06:

• Moved MySQL service to host “sql.webvalence.com”
• Moved Ezine service to “thrush.webvalence.com”

Please report any problems to support@webvalence.com.

With iLife 06 Apple ships iWeb, a media-rich easily-used web site building program for mere mortals.

Whoohoo! You don’t have to have a dot Mac account to publish your iWeb-constructed web site.

WebValence web sites may be enabled for one-step publishing of your iWeb constructed web site. No need to fuss with separate FTP software or web site software that requires too much time and effort to learn.

For more information, contact support@webvalence.com or 503-335-3442.

As the Internet evolves, design practices change.

The fourth generation WebValence web site was re-designed primarily for improved navigation and usability. Secondar goals were to make better use of today’s larger screens and advanced browsers, without sacrificing any of the quick response that was typical of our previous designs.

The graphical layout with curved edges and subtle colors was developed by WebValence associate, Susan Johnson. The layout was realized with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which are expect to become the standard for web sites of the future.

More usability features, including a site search engine, will be added in future months. Comments are always welcome at marty@webvalence.com.

WebValence has selected Postini to provide customer controlled tools that help prevent viruses and junk Email from reaching Inboxes.

Our former spam filtering software (SpamAssassin) was a partial success. It cut spam way back and seldom selected a false positive. But unfortunately it occasionally couldn’t cope with the traffic.

We wanted a complete solution.

With Postini we are confident that we will be handle any amount of growth and give the customers more individual control over their spam and virus filtering. Customers control the settings on filters which detect virus and junk mails. Increase the filter settings to stop more suspicious mail; decrease them to allow more suspicious mail to reach the Inbox.

Customer roll-out of Postini service was completed on May 25, 2004.

WebValence has added Spamassassin open source software to our mail server. According to the developers, “The spam-identification tactics used include:

• header analysis: spammers use a number of tricks to mask their identities, fool you into thinking they’ve sent a valid mail, or fool you into thinking you must have subscribed at some stage. SpamAssassin tries to spot these.
• text analysis: again, spam mails often have a characteristic style (to put it politely), and some characteristic disclaimers and CYA text. SpamAssassin can spot these, too.
• blacklists: SpamAssassin supports many useful existing blacklists, such as mail-abuse.org, ordb.org or others.
• Razor: Vipul’s Razor is a collaborative spam-tracking database, which works by taking a signature of spam messages. Since spam typically operates by sending an identical message to hundreds of people, Razor short-circuits this by allowing the first person to receive a spam to add it to the database — at which point everyone else will automatically block it.

Once identified, the mail can then be optionally tagged as spam for later filtering using the user’s own mail user-agent application.”

We expect these tools to save our customers a significant amount of time over the course of a work week.

Our Inflow Data Center location experienced a power disruption beginning at 7:10am today. Power to many cabinets in the center was interrupted. While the data center building has redundant power; this disruption affected equipment cabinets inside the building.

Emergency electricians were able to restore service to our cabinet at 9:55am. At that time, our equipment was able to resume normal operation.

Inflow is extremely well designed and operated, and this is the first outage that we’ve experienced in the last year at this location.

Viruses such as Klez often cause unwanted subscribe and cancellations to newsletters. This happens when a virus causes Outlook to send messages to the subscribe and cancel addresses for newsletters using a random entry from their address book.

The victim of the unwanted subscribe or cancel isn’t the one who is infected with the virus. It’s some anonymous third party whose Outlook or Outlook Express is causing the problem.

Our newer generation of newsletter hosts (”Zines” and “Letters”) have always protected against the unwanted subscribe by requiring an email subscribe confirmation.

To elimate the problem of unwanted cancellations, we now also require confirmation of subscriber cancellations that are initiated via email.

We recommend that customers with newsletters on older “Lists” host request an upgrade to a newer host. To request this, please send a note to support@webvalence.com.

We have been seeking a mail server with more features than the one we presently use. Our list of desired features included:

• Customer Web Mail access to thier mail box
• Customer administration of email accounts for their domain
• Fast software that is highly dependable and compatible with typical email programs that our customers use
• Compatibility with Unix

After testing Communigate Pro for several months, we are quite pleased with its performance. While it’s not as easy for us to administer as our previous software, we find that it offers all the advantages we were seeking.

Customer migration to the new email service is available immediately for those customers who want to switch. We especially recommend that customers who have experienced issues with mail delay, or difficulties with mail retrieval migrate to the new server, as it seems to help these problems.

Co-Owner Eddy Crouch chaired the technology panel at the Annual ICF Convention in Atlanta. The five panel members briefly addressed a spectrum of technology trends and tools of interest to Coaches.

Stever Robbins has provided a resource area for after conference reference.