Developing eWrite

If anyone wants to now how Not to send bulk emails, come talk to me. I recently had difficulty getting a particular clients email newsletter into their subscribers email inboxes, this costed our business a customer.

While working on the clients newsletter I decided to start from scratch to do everything I could to ensure the software and server were as valid and as transparent as possible to ensure no emails were being labelled as spam. This kicked my ass for a few days and I had some frustrations along the way. Bizarre bugs cropped up with every single test email sent. Sometimes the content displayed the HTML rather than rendering it, other times the ‘to’ name and ‘from’ name didn’t bother displaying.

Rather than more ranting about the problems, Here is a list in no particular order of the actions I took in the hopes that they will help some other company get their emails into inboxes or improve their own software.

Hosting

I Set up a new Virtual Private Server (VPS) with Blacknight - http://www.blacknightvps.com/. This provided me with a static IP address and allowed me to set up reverse DNS.

SPF Record

I Set up an SPF record for our domain name using http://www.openspf.org/.

White Lists

Requested to get our domain name listed on abuse.net

Reporting Tools

Signed up to and paid dnsstuff.com to access to their DNS testing tools. I was able to solve all problems that the reports pointed out.

Signed up to Microsoft’s Smart Network Data Services to receive data about the traffic seen originating from my IP address, such as mail volume and complaint rates.

Email headers

Added new (to me) headers to the out going emails.

Precedence: bulk
List-Id: xxxxx <yyyyy>
List-Owner: <mailto:owner@example.com>
List-Subscribe: <http://www.example.com/path/to/subscribe.php>
List-Unsubscribe: <http://www.example.com/path/to/unsubscribe.php>
List-Help: <http://www.example.com/path/to/help>

Thank you to the staff of blacknight for recommending these headers.

Existing Headers

Date: $date
To: Recipient-Name <Recipient-Email-Address>
From: Recipient-Name <Recipient-Email-Address>
Reply-To: Recipient-Name <Recipient-Email-Address>
Return-Path: Recipient-Name <Recipient-Email-Address>
Message-ID: <".time()."-Recipient-Email-Address>
X-Mailer: PHP v".phpversion()."
MIME-Version: 1.0

The position of ‘MIME-Version: 1.0′ is important. There was an excellent page about this on a site but I can’t find it now unfortunately. Some emails may not display correctly in Microsoft products such as Outlook if this header is the first header.

Reading

I read many forum posts with others also experiencing similar email marketing problems.

Referred to the SpamAssassin tests when encountering any failed tests http://spamassassin.apache.org/tests_3_2_x.html

A older blog post from Michele Neylon regarding the Do’s and Don’ts of mass emailing.

Spam assassin - tips for legitimate senders.

Spamhaus Frequently Asked Questions.

Testing

Sent test after test after test after test to myself and several other email addresses on various domains to test being labelled as false positives and layout issues.

When sending a HTML email, I was getting the PHP code to create a nice and neat text-only version. This would strip the HTML tags and then strip out all the spaces left behind. In my mind I was creating a nice and neat text version. I learned however that leaving the spaces there after trimming the HTML is best, SpamAssassin thinks the content is too different to the HTML if its trimmed back.

Sent test emails to auth-results@verifier.port25.com which provide a free automatic response. In their own words : “The service allows email senders to perform a simple check of various sender authentication mechanisms. It is provided free of charge, in the hope that it is useful to the email community.”

Wrote several custom functions to alter the layout of the emails slightly to allow the email to be displayed properly in some email domains’ web based email interfaces such as the eircom webmail interface.

When defining email headers, use ‘\n’ for line breaks on *nix servers and use ‘\r\n’ on Microsoft servers. When using the incorrect type the email headers may not display at all for some recipients.

Updated our software to send large numbers of emails in smaller chucks so as not to overwhelm anything.

Also added some helpful alerts to let a user know if they are using words or phrases that SpamAssassin doesn’t like and may lead to their email being labelled as spam.

I had problems with my ISP too, the DNS wasn’t refreshing after several days to I began using OpenDNS.org DNS details. Sadly I only found out about this close to the end of my problems but they certainly helped. At one point I couldn’t FTP into the site to make any changes at all.

Result

Our software now sends out a mean email. Unfortunately too late to convince a lost customer. Confidence is low at the moment but I will be working to continue improving the software in any way I can. I will be stricter in what the software allows a user to send out. If anyone has anything else that would help in sending emails or reporting errors, please let me know.

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In the last couple of weeks I have been working with a new customer to come on board with eWrite using our email marketing software called eWrite Messenger. Today I received an email letting me know that they would like to stop using our software to return to a previous method of emailing their customers each month.

Despite a great track record with our existing customers and a lot of work on my part to resolve the situation our software failed this company. They had ended a contract with a leading email marketing company and began to use eWrite Messenger.

From the outset there were problems across the board. Layout of the email was the first problem. I recreated the email ensuring it looked identical but with far less HTML. The next problem was that many people didn’t seem to be getting the emails despite being received in all the tests. I started from scratch with the programming and procedures to send emails too, relearning all what I thought I already knew about sending emails the proper way and not being labelled as spam. I took many steps to make sure the email got into the recipients inboxes and when I did the formatting of the email was fecked once again. This formatting problem was caused by something very very small, line breaks in the email headers.  This was very frustrating considering all the tests to my toolbox of hotmail, gmail, eircom, yahoo and more email addresses all landed and displayed fine.

I recorded the measures I took to ensure the emails were received and I will post them up in my next post, hopefully they may be of use to others in a similar situation. I received plenty of great help and tips from a few people, especially some of the Blacknight staff.

I learned many things from this experience. Im writing about it here because I set up this blog with the intention of writing about the good stuff and the bad stuff as I develop eWrite. Losing a customer like this is not a good feeling and all the worse because not only are they a great business, the kind of customers everyone wants to have, but they are also a family led business which were neighbours growing up.

I’ve gone through embarrassment and plenty of anger with myself over this.  Much of the anger was directed at the customers hosting company who were nowhere to be found when I needed answers and assistance, their online support was fecked too.

The email from the company today to end our service wasn’t out of the blue, I could see it coming.  I know one thing for sure after this, when all tests are done and work, test some more, it could save you losing a valued customer. I won’t be losing any customers again.

I’ve never been so acutely aware of the value of great customer service. When I needed answers or expertise the expected avenues weren’t available. I’ve decided that with our own software the work is not only in creating great software that fulfils a need or solves a problem for the user but also to be there in spades any time they need support.

Not my usual topic to write about but I think its so damn cool. Its an Apple Slicer we got in Boston recently. Just press it onto an apple and slice it in to 8 or 16 slices, removing the core. I’m eating far more apples now.

Whats your favourite non techie product of the month?

The past few days have been particularly tough. I’ve been working on a new clients email newsletter making sure they can get their monthly newsletter into their recipients inboxes.

The clients site is hosted with Register365.  One of the measures to make sure the email gets through is to add an SPF record. To do this I need to update the DNS settings on the clients site. I wanted to search Register365 support to see if I could do this.

Just when I need it most, the support section of Register365 was offline and still is.

Register365's "Support"

Using Google Cache, I can see what it should look like and that it was at least online on November 1^st when Google cached it. Luckily I have Yell if it changes, which is going to send me an email when the site is back online.

Register365 Support on Google's Cache

I ranted about this on Twitter on Friday evening and I was very impressed when I received a message from Stephen McCarron, managing director of Hosting365 asking if he could be of any assistance. Unfortunately Stephen couldn’t help, but I was reminded yet again how Twitter can be a valuable business resource. Thanks for contacting me Stephen.

Blacknight have been the complete opposite to Register365. I signed up to a VPS account allowing me to have a static IP address, set up reverse DNS and more. I talked to several members of Blacknight at different times using their Live Chat and email and every time I was answered promptly and came away a happy customer.

To further prevent me from doing any productive work the last few days, my ISP has been terribly slow to update their DNS records. I pointed a domain name to the new VPS account. Within hours the site was running for anyone I asked to look but when looking at the domain name from my office it still hadn’t updated for 4 days despite flushing my local DNS and resetting the router a couple of times.

So for a frustrating few days when I really needed things to work my own ISP and Register365 failed me. If it wasn’t for Blacknight, their services and staff I’d be completely fecked and I would have most likely lost a valued customer. Thank you Blacknight.

A few days ago this blog turned 6 months old. A very short life for a blog though I’m quite happy that I’ve been able to keep this blog going for so long with hopefully interesting content. My intention for this blog was to write about the ongoing development of eWrite, the software and the business, warts and all. This is still my intention. Its easy to write about the good things, it can be hard to write about the bad things such as missed opportunities and even harder to ask for help.

Luckily there have been little or no bad things to write about. When asking for help, no matter how big or small the request some other blog authors are happy to help or point the way. Of course I would like if we had more customers for our products but thats not a bad thing, thats what ‘work’ is. I will continue to develop the software, meet with new and existing users and try to learn from them to make the software even better.

More than anything, this blog along with other social apps such as Twitter has introduced me to many fantastic people. Through blog comments and Twitter conversations I have met and continue to form relations ships with great minds here in Ireland such as Iarfhlaith Kelly, Damien Mulley, Conor O’Neill, John Peavoy, Michele Neylon, John Keyes, Robin Blandford, Alan O Rourke, Peter Donegan, Derek Organ, Chris B. Kerndter, Dave Kelly, Donncha O’Caoimh, Roger Galligan, Leon Quinn, Aedan Ryan, Frank Prendergast, Calvin Jones the list goes on and on…

I’ve met many great people too in the ‘real’ world through Open Coffee and business organizations such as BNI.

The Feedburner widget showing the modest number of subscribers to this blog is a huge boost for me. The number fluctuates from time to time and I’m sure there is more to that number than I know about, its a great motivation to know that there are a people out there reading what I write. I hope the content has been interesting so far and that it continues to be.

I enjoy writing about our developments at ewrite, getting feedback from fellow developers so that Im not just developing for the sake of developing and creating something useful to businesses. I also enjoy testing out services such as my earlier posts on The Logo Company, advertising on Facebook and posting up any data I get for others to use, hopefully these posts are useful and encourage other businesses to try them out. In the near future I will try to review some tech products out there that I think could be very useful, such as the Sony eBook reader. I think this is a great product with great potential. I had the opportunity to play with the new version in the US recently.

Thank you to all the readers! Keep those comments coming.

As a developer Im quite aware that I should have begun to use version control a long long time ago to develop our apps.

More than once I read about and tried to use CVS or SVN. The learning curve to set these systems up on a server is probably not too steep but I was continually dissatisfied and turned away from it.

I wrote my own version control system at one point using PHP to monitor changes in the files and collect any comments in the changed files. The PHP code could also upload the changed files to the users servers. This worked quite well for a time but I was worried about security and I had a tendency to get bogged down in the development of the system itself instead of what it was supposed to do to help me in my daily work.

Earliy in September I came across SpringLoops and found they offer a free version of their source code management tools. Their free version allowed me to create 1 repository so I signed up and created a repository for eWrite Lite.

I installed TortoiseSVN on my desktop machine and on my laptop and got used to downloading and updating the code from both locations and getting familiar with the terminology.

I’ve read plenty of tutorials and blogs where developers encourage the use of version control. More than once a developer would write “Use version control, you can thank me later”. The smug feckers were right. I’ve been using SpringLoops and TortoiseSVN for a few weeks and its allowed me a freedom to concentrate on the development of the software rather than fiddling around with my own bad habits.

I used to have HP servers in the attic running Ubuntu Server with Apache, PHP and mySQL to host, develop and backup everything I was developing. I sold off all the servers, replaced a dodgy router and ran CAT5e 100MBPs cable through the building rather than using a wireless connection.

On my desktop machine I use WampServer to deploy a development environment of Apache, PHP and mySQL in Windows XP. I can write and test the code on my local machine and use TortoiseSVN to commit the changes to SpringLoops and deploy the stable versions to customers sites.

Im still learning my way around SpringLoops and version control abilities in general. I’ve upgraded to the ‘Field’ package on SpringLoops to allow for more repositories and servers to deploy to.

The packages that are available are more than enough for my needs in some cases but lack a little in others. For example the ‘Field’ package Im using now has 10GB of space, 100 protects and 20 servers per project. The space and projects are way more than I need, but the servers per project are important to me, I need more.

The next package up allows for only 30 servers. I emailed SpringLoops to ask if there were customized packages available. They seemed helpful at first asking what I would need. I asked for at least 50 servers per project and far less space and projects. I’d be more than happy with 10-15 projects and 2-5 GB of space. I didn’t get any reply to that, they probably think Im joking. I’ll contact them again shortly to see if they’ll allow it.

Developing with SpringLoops for the past few weeks has been great. I’ve been able to develop the eWrite products much faster, commit changes to the server and deploy these changes to clients sites with just a couple of clicks, It is far far faster than FTP. I wish I had joined the version control party sooner, the eWrite software and my time are all the better for it.

If you were to spend 1,000 Euro of your own money on your own business, what would you get?

At the start, spending your own money on the business isn’t unusual. If you were past this point or if some extra money landed on your lap, what would you spend it on?

There are a couple of things I would like to spend money on for eWrite. Sometimes its hard enough to get money out of a business to move things on fast enough.

Im considering spending this amount of money myself, currently Im thinking of the following items, I won’t mention their price but in total they are roughly equal to 1000 Euro.

• Paying for a logo recently designed for eWrite
• Paying for a set amount of time for a writer to improve the content of our website.
• A paid account with SpringLoops for better version control of our software for a few months.

Other items I have considered spending money on are BNI membership, travelling to items such as Future of Web Apps in October.

Have you spent your own money on your business in the past? Do you recommend it or advise against it ?

A couple of weeks ago I wondered how many emails I send and receive every day. I was just curious, it wasn’t for any particular purpose really.

I thought it would be cool if my email client Thunderbird had an extension that could monitor my email habits and record the data for me. I considered writing an extension but then I had the idea of getting PHP to check my email inbox on a regular basis and record the info to a mysql database.

I wrote the PHP script and set it to check my email address every ten minutes from the 4th of September to the 15th of September.

On the 10th of September I read an interesting article on Slashdot titled ‘Why Email Has Become Dangerous‘. The article points to a study which states that it can take up to 64 seconds to recover your train of though after receiving an email. A person who checks their email every 5 minutes can waste up to 8.5 hours a week!

I don’t check my email every 5 minutes but I do have Thunderbird open all the time which checks the email every 30 minutes. Also, I have been known to search for wireless signals when Im out and about on my phone to check my email so Im probably just as bad.

Among other info, my PHP script told me how many emails I received each day. I decided to put this information together with the 64 seconds from the study and see how many minutes per day I was being distracted from whatever I was doing.

On average it seems Im distracted only 23 minutes or so per day, not much. Though thats only for one email address. I have 5 of them set up in Thunderbird and it doesn’t include the time involved in responding to them if needed.

Before knowing those results today, I knew I was checking my emails too much anyway. Today I changed my habits to try it out. I checked my emails early in the morning, at lunch time and coming up to 5pm. As a result I got a tonne of work done, 2 items that I thought would take me the day I completed before lunch. I spent the rest of the day mapping out the rest of the week, I plan on getting a lot done now if I can maintain this new habit of checking my emails only a couple of times a day.

A few people are probably going to be annoyed at first, there are a few people I work with that email me often and I’ve always responded immediately to them.

An interesting set of information for me, I’ll be aiming to keep this productivity up by not being distracted by emails every day.

Robin stumbled upon a great way of summarising your entrepreneurial efforts by using 11850. Read Robin’s blog post for the full details.

I had to give it a go so I texted 11850 with the question:

Hello, What is eWrite lite?

Received an answer a couple of minutes later for the cost of a text:

We found that eWrite Lite is a software that allows you to keep your website updated from any location at any time. Thank you.

Sounds good to me. Robin suspects they use Google and I think he’s right. I received the text at 11:09pm and I checked my website traffic around that time.

At 11:07pm a person used Google.co.uk to search for ‘eWrite Lite’.  They viewed our homepage and the contact details page too. Maybe they were anticipating a follow up text from me asking for a telephone number.  The user was using Windows XP and Firefox version 2.0.0.14.

A cool and easy to do experiment, Thanks Robin! And Thanks 11850!

There are many netbooks or mini laptops available at the moment, all started by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and the success of the Asus EEE.

With many hours of productive work under my belt using my own mini notebook, I decided to review my own, the Grandstand Junior Computer.

Specifications:

For ages 6 and over

Modern Alphabetical keyboard layout

Dimensions : 5.5 * 26.5 * 22.5 cm

Batteries : 4 x Duracell MN1400 C Alkaline batteries

Weight: 880 g

Weight of batteries : 280 g

Total Weight 1160 g

Boot up time : Instant on

Programme loading : Instant loading

Mods & Accessories:

ROM Activity Cartrdiges

RAM Memory Cartridges

Comparing the Junior Computer to a Dell Vostro 1500