Spouting Shite

Viral marketing tactics

When is email spam or ham?

We all send silly emails to our friends and colluges…but last December one young London woman got the fright of her life when she found that her email had suddenly gone viral!

Holly Leam-Taylor, a trainee at the London office of Deloitte planned an awards ceremony to name the most attractive men in her office. Thinking this would be a bit of tongue-in-cheek fun, she emailed a small number of her colleagues at the City accountancy firm asking them to vote. With nine categories such as “Fittest body” and “Boy most likely to sleep his way to the top”, her message certainly grabbed attention. To Holly’s amazement the email was forwarded around the world, spreading like wildfire over the internet. Soon millions of people had read it. But it wasn’t such a laughing matter for her managers and less than 24 hours after sending the email, Ms Leam-Taylor felt obliged to resign.

Speaking from the Surrey home where she lives with her parents, the 22-year-old said, “It was just a lighthearted joke to celebrate Christmas. It’s a complete shock that one email could spread like this and who would think it could get so far out of hand? In retrospect, it was a stupid thing to do but there wasn’t anything controversial or sexist in there. But if I could take it back I would and I will be so, so careful about sending any emails in future.” She hit the send button on her Christmas Awards email on Tuesday, December 8, and when she arrived at her office the next day found her inbox full.

While her email was certainly not work related, I wonder was it spam or ham? Arguments could be made for both sides, regardless, spam filters should have stopped it and prevented its spread around the world!

Posted in Email (spam and Malware) | Comments

Upscaling servers makes sense, but upscaling a system is better.

One of the great problems that any system manager has to deal with is capacity. In a strange way we all aspire to have capacity problems…in my opinion capacity problems come hand in hand with success and it is very rare that you have one without the other.

If you work for an enterprise then the problem is rather academic…you simply throw money at the problem. Well, we don’t live in the perfect world. I run a small business and our system has evolved over a period of two years under my ‘bootstrap and transition’ business plan so we have a very diverse network full of equipment from various brands and technologies….when we think of the emailcloud network we don’t think of homogeny

So, how does a system designer / manager deal with capacity issues? Well…there are a few rules:

1. Downtime is unacceptable
2. 7 P’s (Prior Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance)
3. Listen to your friends but emulate your peers
   All too often we make strategic infrastructure or technology decisions on a whim or on the advice of well intentioned friends or colleagues….often these are the first steps down a very long dead end.

In our case we deliberated for months about how to add capacity to our infrastructure. After years of buying bulk equipment on ebay and cabling it up by the cabinet load we came to a number of pinch points:

1. Power. The average age of our infrastructure components were 3.4 years old. With the advances of new power units we felt that we could save on our power bills significantly by replacing some of our equipment. But, buying new servers is expensive, event if you use the new Carbon Trust 0% loans
2. Upscaling servers makes sense, initially. Well, buy being more specific about what servers you buy you could have an investment strategy to upscale them over a period by adding components…for example adding more RAM or upgrading the disk drives to faster models etc. These changes can be made very easily, but it is expensive and very soon you reach the limit of the hardware.
3. Re-design the infrastructure / system….this is a never ending process.

I believe the answer to adding more capacity (on a budget) is to use all of the above, the mantra should be ‘upscaling the system’ rather than ‘upscaling servers’ makes sense.

Ps. I hope that this article kicks the ass of the other GoogleGroope hopefuls

Posted in Cloud Computing | Comments

Top 50 Spamvertised Websites

The emailcloud network processes plenty of data every day. Over the past few months we have been trying to make some of this data public so that other people can use it and last year we published some of this data in the form of a map of worldwide spam locations. This map has proven to be very popular.

Our next data set to make public is our fresh list of ’spamvertised’ websites. A Spamvertised website is one that has been advertised in a spam email. We get this data by looking into the content of spam emails that we stop on our network and striping out all of the website addresses. This data is very important as it allows us to expose the relationships between spammers and website owners.

We have given this data in a live feed to the ReportSpammers.net website. You can see it here:
http://www.reportspammers.net/what-is-spam/top-50-spamvertised-websites/

Posted in Cloud Computing, Email (spam and Malware) | Comments

It all started with ‘Downtime is Unacceptable’, Announcing Google Grope!

A few weeks ago I wrote a simple article about why I think that ‘Downtime is Unacceptable‘ when you run an IT service. I noticed that after around 15 seconds that my article was number one on Google.com for the search phrase! Being really surprised I posted a really quick post on Twitter.

Ling saw my tweet and immediately wrote a blog post on her LingsCars.com site which took the top position on Google a few moments later. As you can guess, this started a war and over the next 48 hours I won and lost the top position several times.

So, after a bit of messing around we came up with the idea of running a weekly competition that is open to developers all around the world. We passed the idea to Jamie and he got working on the concept.

Yesterday, as a result we launched GoogleGrope at the SuperMondays event. This is a weekly competition that allows search engine and SEO experts around the world to compete for a prize. The aim is simple…the person with the top search position for a random phrase after 48 hours is the winner. Check out the website and register!

Posted in google | Comments

Anti-spam law needs to target the Advertiser and the Sender equally.

Alleged spammer Lance Atkinson (left) and his lawyer Darrell Kake (right) leave the Federal Court in Brisbane after the trial. Photo: Scott Casey

Almost every country in the world has drafted legislation that penalises spammers. We feel that these laws are not strong enough as they focus on the spammers and not the actual advertisers…these are almost always different people.

Spammers make their money by selling all sorts of pills and cheap consumer products through spam emails that they send out in massive quantities. A medium sized spam operation can send out around 10 billion messages a day. The spammer does not actually sell the products, they just drive traffic to advertisers who process the sale and then pay a commission to the spammer. Current spam legislation focuses on penalizing the spammer…but before you can do this you need to locate them. This is a very lengthy and expensive exercise…we feel that it is easier to target the advertisers.

After nearly a ten year case US and Australian courts have put an end to the illegal activities of Lance Thomas Atkinson and Jody Smith. The couple ran a huge spam delivery system that spanned several countries and sent out billions of emails a day.

This case was first taken up by BBC reporter Simon Cox in 2000. He got angry when he received an advertisement for some herbal remedy tablets in a spam email. By using a variety of tricks he was able to follow the spammer from Florida, China, India and ultimately to New Zealand. He passed on the details to SpamHaus and they took up the chase.

Spamhaus, which tracks the world’s biggest spam operations, said HerbalKing was the “number one worst spam gang on the internet” during 2007-08. At one point during its operation, HerbalKing may have accounted for over one third of all spam emails. SpamHaus then went on to work with the organizations:

• New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs
• Australian Communications and Media Authority
• U.S. FDA
• Office of Generic Drugs and Division of Pharmaceutical Analysis
• Chicago-based National Association of Boards of Pharmacy
• CastleCops, a non-profit group focused on Internet safety
• Marshall Software (NZ) Ltd.

In 2008 and after three million complaints to the US FTC the US courts issued a temporary injunction prohibiting Atkins and Smith from spamming and making false product claims, and also froze their assets pending a trial. That trial led to a $16m fine. In December 2009 the Australian Federal court issued a $210,000 penalty and in New Zealand he was fined a further $92,715.

After all this hard work very little will be achieved. Atkinson and Smith will not have to pay the US fines unless they travel to the US and the Australian and New Zealand fines could be paid from around one month revenue of their network. They will be back up online very soon and the process will have to start again to stop them.

This case helps to highlight the problem with current anti-spam laws. These try to locate and penalise the spammer. As this case proves, that is a lengthy and expensive job that takes the co-operation of several organisations. We feel that spam laws need to penalise the advertiser too. This is because while it is hard to find spammers such as the Atkinson and Smith, it is much easier to locate the advertisers that use spam. This is because the spam itself almost always has information on how to contact the advertiser. If the advertisers who use spam to advertise were penalised, then spam will be, if not stopped, then greatly reduced. Since much of spam advertises fraudulent products, the advertisers themselves can be prosecuted for fraud.

Posted in Email (spam and Malware) | Comments

Advance Fee Fraud turned on it’s head by Mother London

We have all heard about the Advance Fee Fraud scam emails that have been going around for the past 10 years. This scam has been around for generations…I remember getting a fax version of it over 15 years ago!

The Scam operates as follows: the target receives an unsolicited fax, email, or letter often concerning Nigeria or another West African nation containing either a money laundering or other illegal proposal. Common variations on the Scam include:

• a “bequest” left you in a will
• “spoof banks” where there is supposedly money in your name already on deposit
• fake lottery winnings

If you have an active email address it is probably safe to say that you have received one of these over the past few years.

Well, Mother have turned this scam on it’s head and done it for real! Seriously! Check the video out:

Posted in Cloud Computing | Comments

Resellers are the core of our business

We released emailcloud in September 2007. At that time we were using only a few virtual servers on the Amazon AWS network. Since then we have grown our own network by co-locating lorry loads of servers in data centres in Newcastle, Liverpool, Dublin and the USA.

The route to market for emailcloud has always been to trade through resellers exclusively, they are the core of our business and our reseller relationships are our strongest and most prised assets.

This month, 27 months after we released emailcloud we are getting ready to celebrate our 1,300′eth customer. This is a huge success and we are very grateful to our resellers and partners for making this possible….some of our highest performing partners are:

United Kingdom

• Wyenet
• Custom Computer Services
• Cyberware
• Sussex Internet
• Nomis
• Message Shield
• Eskdale Solutions
• Fusebox Design
• Madefor Computer Services Ltd
• Qruse
  

Ireland

• PcPro Computers
• Fort Technology
• IP-Net
• Blacknight
• Antispam.ie
• Cada Media Ltd

We look forward to continued growth in 2010!

Posted in Email (spam and Malware) | Comments

Agile programming rocks! (Codeworks digital bootcamp)

Yesterday I took part in the Codeworks Connect Digital Bootamp. The event was attended by around 80 software, web and games developers.

After an excellent introdution from Meri Williams the attendees split into three groups for workshops.  Oli Wood from the Bgroup ran the web developers workshop, Chris Hadley from Ubisoft ran the games developers workshop and I ran the software developers workshop.

My presentation covered the basics of project management, why Christopher Columbus was a crap project manager, the Waterfall system, the Agile Manifesto and finally an introduction to Extreme Programming (XP).

You can download my powerpoint slides here:

• Powerpoint 2007
• Powerpoint 2003
• PDF

Posted in Cloud Computing | Comments

antispam and antivirus resellers wanted!

Since the release of our email spam and virus protection service (emailcloud) in September 2007 we have signed up over 1200 SME’s on the system. Our first 1,000 customers took 23 months to register, but since then sales have been very brisk, for example in October we signed up 138 new clients, that is 6.27 new customers per business day !! These are excellent sales figures, especially when you consider the fact that we do not have a direct sales team or any marketing budget.

So, how do we do it? We don’t sell services direct…ever! We only sell our services through a network or resellers, partners and distributors in the UK, Ireland and the USA. This allows us to focus on providing a rock sold infrastructure while our partners manage our sales channel for us.

Our typical reseller is a small IT company or web hosting provider. They use a reseller control panel that allows them to add customers along with their domains and users to the system. Once added to the reseller panel these settings are pushed across our distributed network within five minutes. We get around 80% of our business from this network of hard working resellers. If you run an IT company and you think your customers would be interested in spam and virus protection servers please get in contact…we can get an account setup very quickly for you!

www.antispam.ie

In addition to resellers we also work with white label partners such as www.antispam.ie, www.cadamedia.ie, secure.identityautomationmailscan.com and www.messageshield.co.uk . We have setup co-branded systems for these companies because they already sold email services under these brands and  it was simple to release the service with a brand that these customers recognize and trust…allowing us to get a much larger customer penetrating than would normally be achieved. Do you already provide a spam and virus protection service to your clients? If so please get in contact as we may be able to help you to add more services to your clients, dive up margin and lower costs!

Allowing our partners to focus on sales allows us to keep our costs down and to stay very technically focused. This allows out dev team to attend trade shows, conferences and working groups to learn about new technologies…and in some cases we run the events!

We are looking for more resellers and partners. If you are interested in finding out more please contact us!

Posted in Cloud Computing, Email (spam and Malware) | Comments Off

Downtime is unacceptable

Downtime is unacceptable in any market, and especially not in a commoditized market where customers demand a solid user experience.

Early adopters and Beta testers deal with buggy code, bad documentation and downtime. Such annoyances are ignored because the advantages of testing a new gadget or being the first in your peer group to try out new technology. But, the same cannot be said for users of business critical commoditized services…such as email.

When we decided to release a new business critical service in 2007 we chose to use Cloud Computing providers to help with our infrastructure. This was a risky decision because we were using untested, BETA services to provide a service to customers who would not accept downtime. The only way that we could provide a reliable service that we could rely upon (and charge business customers for using) was to develop a multi-homed system built over several servers located in several datacenters owned by several different providers.

I read stories almost daily about Gmail outages, AWS glitches and even Rackspace downtime. You would be forgiven for believing that these are new issues for the IT community…but they are not! We have been dealing with downtime and service outages since the dawn of the Internet. If you want to provide a reliable service to your users then you need to identify single failure points (SPOF) in your infrastructure and take appropriate action to ensure that they have ZERO or marginal effect on service delivery.

In our case we had two SPOF, capacity and scan server downtime. We dealt with the capacity issue by working with AWS and Flexiscale to allow us to ‘scale up’ as necessary and we hedged our bets against downtime by locating our infrastructure in multiple data centers. A simple network map is as follows:

or during downtime:

Cloud Computing has been the buzz word of 2007 & 2008. As a technology it has matured significantly and there are many varied suppliers in the market. While all of the various suppliers tell us that their network is the best, or their technology is rock solid, it would be a rather foolish person not to hedge their bets and look for multiple suppliers. The old adage still stands, proper planning prevents piss poor performance.

Update (4th November 2009):
Thanks to Ling Valentine from LingsCars.com for writing a blog post and linking here. Ling’s point is rather important, any downtime on your web service is both avoidable and unacceptable. Using multiple infrastructure suppliers is both possible, affordable and prudent in proper infrastructure management. Lings post and link her has helped this blog post become the number result for the ‘downtime is unacceptable’ search term!

Posted in Cloud Computing | Comments