Spammers are an odd bunch. I assume they were just probing to see if my email address was valid when I received this creative message a minute ago:
Subject: xaiedu
Fifteen birds in five firtrees, their feathers were fanned in a
fiery breeze!
But, funny little birds, they had no wings!
I’ve spent a good amount of time trying to find certain features in OpenOffice. These are features that I commonly used in Microsoft Word or Excel, but were difficult to find in it’s open-source equivalent. Maybe I’ll save a few people some time:
Brian H just told me that Insert Page Break is Insert > Manual Break. Lol, must have missed that.
Today I spent some time compiling a list of all of the RFCs that our email hosting system supports. See any I might have missed?…
1939 - POP3
2449 - POP3 Extension Mechanism
3501 - IMAP4rev1
2683 - IMAP4 Implementation Recommendations
2180 - IMAP4 Multi-Accessed Mailbox Practice
2088 - IMAP4 non-synchronizing literals (LITERAL+)
2177 - IMAP4 IDLE command
2342 - IMAP4 Namespace
2087 - IMAP4 QUOTA Extension
3348 - IMAP4 Child Mailbox Extension
3502 - IMAP4 MULTIAPPEND Extension
3691 - IMAP4 UNSELECT command
2221 - IMAP4 Login Referrals
draft - IMAP4 Extension for SASL Initial Client Response
2821 - SMTP (updated rfc821)
3463 - SMTP Enhanced Mail System Status Codes
3464 - SMTP Delivery Status Notifications
2554 - SMTP Extension for Authentication
2920 - SMTP Extension for Command Pipelining
3207 - SMTP Extension for TLS
1870 - SMTP Extension for Message Size Declaration
1652 - SMTP Extension for 8bit-MIMEtransport
2476 - SMTP Message Submission (port 587)
1945 - Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.0
2616 - Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1
2822 - Internet Message Format (updated rfc822)
2045..2049 - Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME)
2183 - Content-Disposition MIME header
1894 - Message Format for Delivery Status Notifications
2298 - Message Format for Message Disposition Notifications
3503 - Message Disposition Notification profile for IMAP
3462 - Multipart/Report Content Type
3834 - Automatic Responses to Electronic Mail
2246 - The TLS Protocol Version 1.0
2595 - Using TLS with IMAP and POP3
2142 - Required abuse@ Mailbox Name
4408 - Sender Policy Framework (SPF) Version 1
Beth just hung a bunch of new artwork at Sigma Grill. This series contains unusual shots of fruits and vegetables… really cool.
Her website and blog is also now online at www.bethbarnettstudio.com. You can see her work on the site, including the new stuff that is at Sigma, as well as the custom art she did for Webmail.
David Catalano helped her get the site online and is hosting it for her. Thanks man!
An opinion held by some anti-spam experts is that "Email is Broken". These folks want to fix the spam problem by completely overhauling the Internet’s email systems and replace SMTP with new protocols that will not allow spammers to pollute the inbox. They compare email to protocols such as Usenet NNTP, which was abandoned by the average Internet user years ago because it lacked simplicity and was not a very powerful way to share information and files, when compared to other web tools such as discussion boards, BitTorrent and blogs. Or FTP which was abandoned by tech-savvy folks who know it’s security risks.
Replacing today’s email protocols with something new would be a great solution if email was indeed broken… But it is not.
Email’s success is based on the fact that it is open and simple. Everybody can understand it, so everybody uses it, and that is what makes it so powerful. Replacing the simplicity of today’s email protocols with something more secure yet more complicated, will break the very thing that makes email great.
Keep that in mind when you are building your killer anti-spam solution. We are.
Last year Beth and I bought our first house. We used a Realtor. Our experience was great, and I would recommend my Realtor, Rhonda Brewer, to anybody looking to buy a home in the Blacksburg area (and I have recommended her to a few co-workers). Rhonda led us through the home buying process from start to finish. She helped us locate properties, tour them, helped us make the winning offer in a competitive bid situation, and guided us through all of the legal crap. Thanks Rhonda!
However… if there had of been an electronic alternative available for at least part of the buying process, I would have used it. This is nothing against Rhonda, or my uncle Den who is a Realtor in Rhoad Island, or any Realtor for that matter. I just think your market needs a disruptive company to come in and shake things up a bit. I was surprised at how lo-tech the home shopping tools available are, and how closed of a system the MLS is. Home listings are posted on the MLS for licensed Realtor eyes only several days before they are available on the public sites. Sometimes homes are sold before they ever reach the public listings. Come on this is 2006! Put this information directly in the hands of your customers and find a new way to make money from it.
Also, it sucks that you have to go to a completely separate web site to find information on historical home sales in the neighborhoods you are shopping in. Whoever opens up the MSL and integrates this data will make a killing – somehow.
Today I read about what Redfin is doing in Seattle and San Francisco. They have opened up the MLS and integrated historical sale data, and mapping software. And if you want they’ll even help you make an offer and help you through the legal crap. Awesome. Realtors are up in arms over there and sending Redfin employees threats and other nastiness. But they shouldn’t be. This was bound to happen. The information should be publicly accessible, just like it is in every other efficient market.
Realtors: If you look at this change as something that is going to steal your job away, it will. If you embrace this change and change with it, then you will survive and even gain customers.
I do not see Redfin’s make-an-offer / legal-representation service as an alternative to using a Realtor. Realtors know their local markets well, know the neighborhoods and may always do better than an online service at this. Redfin’s service instead is an alternative to buying a home without a Realtor, which a lot of people do. Redfin is trying to capture a 1% commission from the home sales that are not currently giving Realtors any commission.
My predictions:
(1) Redfin or a similar company will take this business model nation-wide within the next couple of years.
(2) Traditional Realtors will be bitter about this and will quickly become obsolete. The older generation of home buyers will continue to use Realtors, but the demand for traditional Realtors will shrink and there will be less of these folks around.
(3) Progressive Realtors will accept and embrace this change and look for ways to capitalize on it. They will point their customers to the online tools, help them use the tools, and be there for them when it is time to make an offer. Realtors will do less per sale, but they will be able to work more efficiently with their clients by letting their clients do the searching for what they want, rather than they Realtor doing the search as a middle-man.
(4) The buying agent commission will decrease and/or buying agents will start giving cash back to the buyer as Redfin is doing. Currently it is 3% of the sale price.
(5) More people will use a Realtor when buying a house because of the commission decrease.
(6) Similar change will occur on the seller-side, but less rapidly because it is not nearly as needed.
Back in March, I received an email from Red Sox Nation notifying me that I had been selected during the ticket lottery to purchase tickets to sit in the Green Monster section at Fenway for any game this season. I had one day to pick which game I wanted before the 12-hour window to purchase tickets began. Obviously I tried for any Yankees game I could get, but those tickets went within the first few minutes and I was too late. So I settled for a Friday night Rangers game on June 9th. Still, its Monster seats!
Well, it just so happens that this is the year that 5 of my friends decided to get married. And it also just so happens that one of the weddings is on June 10th in Atlanta.
I posted my two tickets on eBay last night if you are interested. 🙁