In July 2002 Beth and I took off for 11 days and drove up the entire California coastline.  We started in San Diego, visited a friend in Temecula and then started up the coast on Highway 1.  We skipped over LA and made stops at random hotels in Santa Barbara, Carmel/Monterey, Palo Alto, and spent 2 days in San Francisco & Berkeley.  On day six we ran out of hotel money, so we bought camping gear at Target and continued on.  Before camping we hit a few vineyards between Napa and St. Helena and discovered our new favorite wines: a Cabernet from Silverado Vineyards, and a S. Anderson white that you are supposed to drink warm (it looks like S. Anderson is now owned by Cleff Lede).  Then we made a b-line back to the coast, and spent our first night camping at a random camp site up in the mountains.  The next day we hiked and camped in Sequoia National Park, and the day after that we did the same in the Redwood National Forest (it happened to be bikers week in Redwood National Forest, so all of the small towns were filled with folks wearing leather and bandannas – who knew?).  Our flight back to Virginia was out of San Diego airport, so on day 9 we started back down the coast – this time on the main highways.  We made it all the way from the Redwoods down to Malibu in one day and spent the night camping right off the beach in Malibu… we could hear the ocean; it was awesome.  The next day we hit the beach and ate our first ever Fish Tacos (which has since become one of our favorite home cooked meals).  That night we drove back to San Diego.  We attempted to hit a camp site there but it was full of homeless people, so we got a hotel in Carlsbad.  We hit the beach again that morning in Carlsbad, and then finally caught our flight back home.

It was a great trip.  It was also the one and only time that I have been completely disconnected from Webmail.us since we founded the company in December 1999.  All of my other trips have been short, and I have had full access to email and cell phone, and spent at least 25% of the time working.

Well, after 4 years it is time to once again pull all of the geek stuff out of my head for a week…

Next month Beth and I are getting married (ya, I know… we’ve been together for 6.5 years now; but I’ve been busy!).  After the wedding on March 11th, we are going to Mazatlan, Mexico for 7 days, where I plan to do nothing buy sit in the sun, refresh my scuba skills, and drink a few tequila concoctions.

And tomorrow, me and the crew head to Vegas for a few days for the bachelor party.  I will still be "connected" there, although probably not in a state to do any work.

In 2002, it was a bit rough for the folks at the office while I was away.  But since then we have built a phenomenal engineering and support team that I am more than confident in…  Korey, Kirk and team, the email hosting system is all yours!

Look at the cool things that the Webmail.us team built this weekend during Hackathon, as well as photos of this cool bunch.

I missed it unfortunately.  I had to go to DC with Beth this weekend so that we could finalize the details for our wedding next month.  I did get to hit a Wizards game Sunday afternoon while Beth was doing the extreme girly stuff.

After my last post on this subject,
I sat down with Wenjie and we refined our email stats logic.  He was
able to add new code that tracks the viruses that are rejected during the SMTP
session, and corrected a big inaccuracy with the spam numbers.  I have a lot more confidence in the Email Breakdown
graph on our home page now.  One surprising outcome was that the virus
percentage actually dropped.  I had expected it to increase, but these
spam numbers are blowing everything else away… crazy.

While we were at it, Brian H changed the graph to show 24-hour averages rather than 30-day averages.  So the numbers are a lot more dynamic now.  He also modified
the “Top 5 Email Viruses” to exclude phishing emails which are
identified by ClamAV during virus
scanning.  Now it just lists viruses, as it should.

Something interesting to watch is how the numbers
fluctuate on the weekends.  The data is delayed by 24-hours, so take a look this
Sunday.  Spam traffic will jump to almost 95%, compared
85%-87% during the week.  I guess that means most our customers aren’t
working on Saturday and Sunday… good for them.

Web traffic is one of many rough ways to estimate a company’s growth.
Check out our traffic over the past two years.  It’s pretty amazing.
The values below are calculated based on page view stats collected by
Amazon’s Alexa toolbar, and represent all of the websites under the
"webmail.us" domain (e.g. www.webmail.us, secure.webmail.us,
admin.webmail.us, lite.webmail.us, etc).  A detailed description of
this data is available here.

These graphs are generated dynamically, so check this blog post out again in a few months to see if we’re still growing 🙂  …and note that these graphs don’t represent the growth of our reseller business.

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How many people out of a million go to any of the Webmail.us sites each day:

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Webmail.us’s traffic rank against all other web sites on the internet:

Our exact traffic rank today is:

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Out of every million web pages viewed on the internet, this is how many of those page views are on Webmail.us sites, excluding duplicates by the same user:

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Just for fun, click on these:

http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=320&h=240&r=2y&u=everyone.net&y=r

http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=320&h=240&r=2y&u=swishmail.com&y=r

http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=320&h=240&r=2y&u=usa.net&y=r
http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=320&h=240&r=2y&u=simplicato.com&y=r