Lotus Notes Spam

Tags: Alumni Showcase

I will be speaking to a group of students about entrepreneurship at UMass Lowell, where I did undergraduate work in Chemistry (not computer science). I am working on the subject "Getting Started with a New Entrepreneurial Venture" aimed at students who would be first-time entrepreneurs:

UMass Lowell’s Alumni Showcase Please join fellow alumni, friends and members of the University community for the following speaking engagement as part of UMass Lowell’s Alumni Showcase. Frank Paolino ’80, Chemistry Founder and President, MayFlower Software Monday, April 26, 2010 2 p.m. Frank Paolino is the chief technologist, architect and visionary of all of MayFlower Software’s products and services. In addition to his degree from UMass Lowell, Paolino has an MBA from UMass Amherst, and will talk to the audience about his experience in and knowledge of the software industry, business strategies and entrepreneurial ventures.

Posted by Frank Paolino At 11:06 AM Location Boston | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Tags: Redundancy

This was just posted to LinkedIn, showing SpamSentinel MX Failover preventing mail from being lost. Thanks to Kurt Tomicich.

From LinkedIn discussion:

Comments

SpamSentinel recently began offering MX Fail-Over to existing clients and it sure came in handy! I signed up for it and got busy (read "forgot to implement") after it was set up for me, but Chris Rich followed up and nudged me so I'd modify the MX records for the 5 domains going through my Domino server. Less than a week later there were some server issues that had the server up and down for a couple days. Not only did the MX Fail-Over prevent mail from bouncing back to senders (and kept me from looking bad to my clients) but Chris was very helpful while addressing the problems when, for just an instant, it appeared that the issues may be SpamSentinel related. Once again, far above and beyond the call of duty! Thanks!

Posted by Frank Paolino At 2:22 PM Location Boston | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Tags: Brand Loyalty

We found a "customer" who has been stealing our SpamSentinel software for about a year now. Frankly, we are flattered. He could have stolen anyone's software, but he chose ours! We feel honored, to say the least!

I guess we are happy that he likes our software. What if he said "It is not even worth nothing?". But that can't be true. Our software has a value to him, as he had to spend time to steal it, and time equals money.

It takes a lot of time to figure out how to work around a locking system, but it was obviously worth it to him to get the best in spam protection. It gives new meaning to the term "brand loyalty". I mean, we could use him as a testimonial "we love this anti-spam software for Lotus Domino so much that we steal it!"



Here is their server check-in document. Notice the monthly reinstalls, 10 so far:





To quote Bill Gates who knows a bit about this subject:

"As long as they are going to steal software, we want them to steal ours"

Even though "the customer is always right",  we needed to do something, so we added this to the subject of each spam message: "SpamSentinel Trial License Expired - please email license@maysoft.com to obtain license".

Let's see if that gets him to contact us. But we really are flattered!

Posted by Frank Paolino At 10:01 AM Location Boston | Permalink | Comments (6) |      

Tags: 4/1

In an unexpected turn of events, none of our customers are reporting receiving any spam today.

We checked with hundreds of them worldwide, and the reports were identical:  "No Spam".

Many users are asking their IT managers "where is my spam"?

When researching it, we found the most probable cause of this to be a combination of the Can-Spam act of 2003 and Microsoft's efforts to end spam by 2006.



"Finally, the spammers are obeying the law and have stopped spamming", one government official was quoted as saying.  "It is just really good to have control of our mail system again. So we can shut off our mail filters now."

Yes, shut off the mail filters.

Spam has ended for good.

Posted by Frank Paolino At 1:00 PM Location Boston | Permalink | Comments (4) |