Archive for June, 2006

Earn $10.00 for referring new members

Saturday, June 24th, 2006
Dear Customer, 

After reviewing our advertising budget and attempting to determine what method of advertising works, I found something that really surprised me.  I found that a substantial amount of new customers were coming via referrals from existing customers.  Obviously this was pleasing to see.  I took some time reflect upon this and came up with a plan to compensate those who refer new customers.

For all paying customers you refer, you will receive a $10.00 check (or Paypal if you prefer). 

    It’s as simple as that. So what is the catch?  Here are a few simple rules.
  • When new users signup, they must place your username in the “How did you find us:” box at the signup page.  There will be no exceptions!
  • Your check will be sent to you 30 days after payment for the referred customer is made.  This is for our protection in order to prevent bogus and fraudulent transactions.
  • You may not send mass mailings in order to acquire new customers.  This will result in a suspension of your own account.
I hope you take advantage of this offer.  My hope is that many of you can make a substantial supplemental income! 

Thank you for your patronage,

Brian

Our bad experience with Barracuda Networks

Monday, June 12th, 2006

Dear Customers,

I bought a Barracuda Model 400 last October.  Our current setup is as follows:
Barracuda GW —> Internal servers —> Spamassassin server —> Quarantine or local delivery.

Although there was a small percentage of spam being caught by adding the Barracuda, this was because I added my own Regex rules on the Barracuda.  Without my Regex rules, using their “intent” RBL, a trained bayes, and SBL-XBL RBL, the device gave me nothing in terms of more spam captured than Spamassassin with SARE.  In fact, I don’t have concrete numbers but I am willing to put $100 and say SA/SARE does better.

Because I am a customer, I have access to the Barracuda Networks forums.  I am not the only one unimpressed and since it’s a moderated forum, all the postings I have made which have a negative undertones, do not get posted.

OK, enough of that.  I bought the server in October (8 months ago) for about $4800.  This included a years license.  Well, the server has a bad drive based on their support’s diagnostics.  They want me to pay $899 to have it replaced!  FWIW, if you open the box yourself, it voids support.

I want to say that if your thinking of buying one of the Barracuda Networks Spam Firewall
(www.barracudanetworks.com), save your money!.  I would have been better off spending about $2000 for two decent servers and running SA/SARE at the perimeter.

I hope this helps somebody else from making the same mistake.

Brian

New Usermail.com feature - RSS email feed

Monday, June 5th, 2006
Dear Usermail.com customer,
We are happy to announce a new feature we have added to the arsenal of tools available to our customers.  We have deployed a new tool which enables you to see who is emailing you via any RSS Reader.  For those unfamiliar with RSS feeds, this has become a popular way to post news and information in an easy and readily manner.  Please visit the following link for more information
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)

 

How does it work?
Incoming mail gets fed to a database where the Date, From field, and Subject are written. This information is formatted to for your RSS Reader
Only the From address, Date, and Subject are displayed.
The body of the message is not displayed as we see this as a security and/or privacy risk.
How do I activate my RSS feed?

 

Please visit http://www.usermail.com/
Click “My Account” in the left hand menu.
Click “Enable RSS”.
The URL for your RSS feed will be presented.  Place this URL into your reader.

You can also disable and change your RSS feed address from this interface.

 

Where can I find an RSS Reader?

You may use this link in order to search Google for RSS Readers. Google Search for RSS Readers 

What do you have planned in the near future?

  • We are currently working on an option to send a copy of your email to your pager and/or phone.
  • file storage.
  • and more….

We hope that you find this feature useful and as always, thank you for your business.

Brian F.

Usermail.com