MayFlower Software

Category : Blog Spam
So this blog is being targeted by spammers to advertise their products. I don't get a lot of comments, so I made the default ACL "Readers" to stop the spam overnight and moved on to the next thing on my Agenda.

I did not bother to test the blog by creating a comment because I knew it would work.  Until it didn't.

Moral of the story: Make changes and test them, or as a customer told me on my first week as a consultant:

Don't expect it if you don't inspect it.

Still good advice today.


Below is what I saw this morning.

Posted by Frank Paolino At 9:03 AM Location Boston | Permalink | Comments (5) |      

Category : Funny

This is a pretty funny skit. Jon talks about Social Media and email spam. I don't want to spoil the fun, but here are a few excerpts:

"The ones from Barack Obama have the subject line "Hey"...you don't need to address anyone as "Hey" to be cool. You're the President, that's pretty f---ing cool!  You don't need to resort to the sort of fake familiarity that spammers use ... Second, everytime I open those super casual bro-mails, the message is always the same "Give me money".  EVERYTIME! It's like you don't really value our make-believe friendship! Then there is "Can We meet for Dinner?". Sure! Then, a few days later, "I'm bringing Michelle"...

View the entire skit here:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Spamalot
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

                                               

Posted by Frank Paolino At 8:45 AM Location Boston | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category : Fun
The WAIKIKI SPAM JAM Festival is a street festival that celebrates the people of Hawaii's love for SPAM products a canned meat from Hormel Foods. In Hawaii, you will find SPAM family of products at all grocery and convenience stores, many restaurants and in most homes in Hawaii. 

According to Barbara Campbell, vice president of Outrigger Enterprises Group, one of the event’s founding sponsors, more SPAM  is consumed per person in Hawaii than is consumed in any other state in the United States. "Each place in the world seems to have its own signature food festival. With almost seven million cans of SPAM eaten every year in Hawaii, a festival featuring SPAM seemed appropriate."

Here are some of the recipes titles: SPAM PAN LAU LAU: A variation on an authentic Hawaiian Favorite SPAMAKOPITA: A variation on Spinach Pie SPAM  Musubi: Sushi with a twist Hawaiian SPAM Sandwich: Pineapple and Spam !! SPAM Okonomiyaki (Japanese Pancake) Loaded Potato Skins with SPAM Ono Mac & Cheese with SPAM

"Since it’s inception in 2002, the Waikiki SPAM JAM Festival has become one of the most popular festivals in Hawaii. This year, we’re expecting more than 20,000 people to join the festivities in Waikiki," Campbell said.


If you want to try these recipes from SpamJam at home, you can find some of these recipes here:
http://www.spamjamhawaii.com/recipes.html



SPAM is a registered trademark of Hormel Foods, Inc.


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Posted by Frank Paolino At 5:49 PM Location Boston | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category : Fun
This is a fun story of a spam attack that ends up uniting a group of people. As reported in the Wall Street Journal article, a spam message sent to a listserv address created an auto-reply to all. Many other people replied-to-all with "remove". This happened over and over. Finally, one user said:

"Do people understand that, by replying to all, you're perpetuating this ridiculous spam cycle?" someone from the U.K. wrote. "I realize that I'm doing exactly the same by sending this message, but I thought it was an observation worth airing to the group."

To which others "replied-to-all" to agree, adding more noise and some anger.

But a funny thing happened along the way: The mutual misery of spam hell changed into a sort of comradery, uniting many of the spam victims. As the WSJ reports:

Then, the tone suddenly changed. Padraig Belton, a writer in London, made a suggestion: "Personally, I feel that after this many emails from you lot, we should all knock off together to the pub." His motion was seconded. "Hello from Canada, all!…  Where's the pub?" "I am in," wrote a third person. "And, yes, I know in replying to all, I am adding to the madness."

But the best part of the story is the creation of a LinkedIn group, called Unified by Spam - The Social Experiment.

Here the members can all get to know each other. In a strange way, serendipity brought them together. From Wikipedia, Serendipity means a "happy accident" or "pleasant surprise" of finding something good without looking for it. 


Here is one of the quotes from the group:





So I am off to join this group and meet some new people from around the world...

Posted by Frank Paolino At 9:46 AM Location Boston | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category :
When you work to support other people you, you may not realize how cool the product is until you really get to use it yourself . My name is Jason and I have worked with MayFlower to support their SpamSentinel and MBE (Manage By Example) products for several years now. I personally have never had a need for anti-spam and anti-virus software on my own Domino servers. Why? I was always careful with my email addresses, I never get spam. I only sign up for things using my gmail account in order to keep all the junk on Google's servers.

Here's where things changed recently after a very poor decision on my part to use my business email to sell an elliptical and bowflex on craigslist. Anytime I sell something on craigslist, I use my gmail address. For some reason, this time, I entered in the wrong address. My heart dropped. The capta was verified! I was getting 6-12 messages day in my inbox from women named Sasha who had "tagged me" as their favorite on Russian dating sites. Although I am single, I have never been on a Russian dating website, and although I appreciated all the attention from the spammers (and I'll admit, some of the pictures), I soon realized that I now, after nearly 5 years, needed an anti-spam/anti-virus product! I cannot imagine the questioning I would get from my daughters if they went up to my computer to play a harmless game and saw the emails that had come in over night.

Thankfully I didn't have to look far. I of course downloaded and installed SpamSentinel (enhanced with MBE) to a checking machine run on a VM. This is my configuration because I run Domino on Linux (since Linux is sweet, free and what every small business likes). I found myself being the customer. I configured SpamSentinel and MBE. My spam stopped cold. I can say that I do, at times, miss daily emails from Sasha and the crew of "whatever DOT ru, " I don't miss the time it took to weed through those 6-12 emails per day.

What I'm even more excited about is that I am now using manage by example in a real-world situation where I see it working and saving me time. It knows my preferred senders, those go to my in-box. It sends my newsletters to the newsletters folder. If I want a sender to go to junk, I just drag it! MBE is saving me time! It's making SpamSentinel work even better. I get it now.

Posted by Jason Baird At 7:31 AM Location Boston | Permalink | Comments (1) |      

Category : Lotusphere2012
This year at Lotusphere 2012, we are continuing our practice of providing our "literature on a business card." That means if our products are interesting, you can simply take a card and get the rest of the information online, where it is always more current.

Here is a sample of our "literature" which is the size of a business card:



It contains a QR Reader to jump to our website, and some simple product and contact information.

As Antoine Leboyer at GSX mentioned in his blog post Being Green at Lotusphere, "ask yourself whether you really keep and read all these papers which vendors like us give you".

We agree and we hope more vendors adopt "lightweight literature", as it makes for a greener and lighter user experience at Lotusphere.

Posted by Allison Cote At 8:00 AM Location Boston | Permalink | Comments (1) |      

Category : Lotusphere
Kudos to Mats Jansson of Donova.se for building a really useful iPhone and iPad app to locate and connect with friends at Lotusphere 2012.

It is useful to find one friend among the 10,000 delegates. The friend could be right around the corner and you can see them and stop and talk with them.

To use it, all you need to do is register your name, email, company and country. You can then make and receive friend requests. There are three options to show limited numbers of people. My Friends shows a single friend at a time. My Company shows all people in your company. My Country shows all people from a single Country (all Swedish people, for example).

A small problem is that you cannot see only your friends, so you could see the 50 people you interact with most often (Mats Jansson says this can be changed, but Apple takes 10 days to approve changes, which will miss Lotusphere).

Here is a map of the United States with locations, showing the initial installation of the app:




Mats is working on an Android version as I write this, and I will post and tweet the location to download that version as it becomes available.


You can find it on the Apple app store:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lotusphere-friends-map/id474806341

Posted by Frank Paolino At 9:30 AM Location Boston | Permalink | Comments (8) |      

Category :
So we are re-launching the NotesAppStore as JustForDomino.  Why?

Well, I could cite the many people who said it is not really a store, but that's not why.

I could say we wanted a more memorable name, but that's not why.

Maybe it is a re-launch of the site, which is partially true.

Or maybe AppStore is a registered Apple trademark, although Amazon does not agree (see their AppStore here).  Anyway, Apple didn't like the way we used the term AppStore, leaving me a choice between wasting money defending a name for a free website or to cut my losses. After careful consideration (i.e. 30 seconds of deliberations), I decided to change the name.
 
Yes, that's why.

Posted by Frank Paolino At 11:30 AM Location Boston | Permalink | Comments (4) |      

Category : Seasons Greetings
We would like to wish everyone a safe, enjoyable and a relaxing Holiday Season!

If you do happen to be in Orlando in January for Lotusphere 2012, be sure to stop by our booth (#529).

Best wishes to everyone in 2012.



Click on this image to hear "Feliz Navidad" and see Allison lead Jason, Dan, Nick and Frank in some Christmas celebration:

http://sendables.jibjab.com/view/402seRPaJfXJNx3O

Posted by Frank Paolino At 11:56 AM Location Boston | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category : Social Business
From Wikipedia: The term Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue.


I would like to first say that Twitter, Blogging, Facebook and LinkedIn make us a more social business, and it is true to a degree. We have made many new connections via these social networks. They seem to be  used mostly as "micro-advertising" services, which serves a useful purpose announcing a product release or researching software fixes or people who you may be hiring.

There are two new and undiscovered social networking tools that we find to be extremely useful: Email and the Telephone. Yes, I know, we are talking 20th century here.  "Legacy systems". Tools that are definitely not hip or cool.

Email is only a one-to-one communication, is private and cannot improve Google rankings! It is also a time waster!  All true!  However, we have a unique spin on email, a rather radical one at that:  We publish our email addresses on our website. Crazy talk! We don't even do the frank at maysoft dot com thing.  I just write frank@maysoft.com There! I did it! Why people list 100 ways they can be found on their self-published blogs and yet don't list an email address if they want others to connect? Isn't that the meaning of social business, or did I miss its meaning, which otherwise would only be micro-advertising?


The second social networking tool is the telephone. Not for calling others, but for letting them call you. So, we also list phone numbers on our support website. More crazy talk? Perhaps. I personally am dumbfounded when a company spends all this time and money advertising, leading me to a website where I cannot find a phone number or email address!  If I hunt enough, I get a generic phone number and then get a recorded message that sounds like this: "Thank you for calling Micro-company! NoBody is here to answer your call, but if you leave a message, Someone will get back to you." Is this a script that they are required to follow? Who is Someone? In a bow to Odysseus, they should change "Someone" in the script to "NoBody".  NoBody will get back to you!

As a small business owner, we have always had a live human being answer the phone (being a living person is a job requirement here). That is a very social thing to do.  We also have the same live people respond to customer emails. Our customers can call and ask for people by name. There is no one here whose name is "Support". If a customer calls and asks for "Support", Allison (who answered the phone) says "Let me connect you to Frank". Very, very social. If that customer calls back, and has the temerity to ask for Frank by name, then they get connected to Frank. Scary stuff, almost radical by today's standards of "NoBody" support'.

I have often been asked "Would that work in a large organization"?  My very crisp answer is: "I have no friggin' idea! I don't run a large organization. Let them figure it out themselves". It works wonderfully for me. I had one prospective customer who asked me during Lotusphere "do you return support calls within 48 hours"?  I replied, "We normally take calls immediately during working hours. However, for you, I can make an exception and make you wait 48 hours if that's what you want".  This gained me a new customer.

So by all means do the "social networking" thing. But don't forget with all this "broadcast" micro-marketing, that at the end of the day, business is conducted not by two companies, but by two people who must connect by phone, email or in person.

Posted by Frank Paolino At 1:40 PM Location Boston | Permalink | Comments (0) |