dougandrews.co.uk

My spam folder had 360 emails in this morning. Instead of going through the lot I decided to try and whittle them down by searching on keywords. These seemed to fall into the following main categories, there is some overlap between them:

Sex:

viagra

satisfy/satisfaction

penis/pen1s

Gambling:

royale

casino

Spoofs:

received

reminder

amazon

skype

verizon

address (my address has changed)

mailbox

Gifts:

wathes  (watches!)

watches

warranty

received

real

Medicine:

Codeine

Symbols:

$%!?

Desperate/vunerable:

diploma

degree

Misc:

we

something

Using the above I managed to delete about 300  of my initial 360. There were 21 false positives, mostly message failed or undeliverable notices ro auto-emails that were genuine, and about 40 which didn’t fall into any of the above and were not sufficiently volumous to make it worth trying to search on each one.

When I started I thought it would be easier than trawling through them but there were a lot more variables than I expected. It would probably make sense to do this if you’ve been away for a couple of weeks and come back to 3,000+ spam emails but on a daily basis I think I’ll just reach for the delete button.

ah! after my last frustrated attempt to renew our thawte security cert I was pleased to receive an email from Thawte saying that I have to update my site seal and that this will remove the need in future to update the seal when renewing the certificate - so that’s good news.

Unfortunately we’re now looking to move hosts from Windows -> Apache and as a part of this I’m having to move the security certificate. Thawte have a ‘knowledge base’ article to help with this but 2 thirds of the way down it says ‘Run the following command using OPENSSL’.

Having been to openssl.org and made little headway I asked a thawte support rep for, well support. His response was that they support the cert but not third party applications. While on the one hand I can understand this, on the other if you are going to direct a customer down a certain route which they have no alternative but to go down you should not just wash your hands of it and say ‘good luck’ - or at least not if you don’t want to piss your customer off!

I had an interesting email today that caught me eye: despite being addressed directly to me and including pertinent information (i.e. correct geographic location) I am convinced that it is spam - although having looked online to see if anyone else has received anything similar I’ve found nothing. The reason for bothering to post this online is because the personalised nature of it made it stand out as an advance in their techniques.

I’m including a copy of the email below, but the reasons for thinking it is Spam are:

- a hotmail sender address! (debbish6els@hotmail.com)

- The ‘Castellum Group’ is spelt Castellum and Castelum and put in inverted commas in an effort (I guess) of making it seem more important

- spelling mistakes (word wide web)

- grammar (we are looking for the new, talented, and responsible staff)

- classic Spam territory: financial transfers

- dubious promises (You will not have to pay the any tax)

- a different reply-to address than the sender address

- a search for the Castellum Group brings up  a real estate company, not a financial services company

Here’s the email:

Dear Doug Andrews,
“The Castellum Group” is glad to announce an opening for the position of a customer relations manager in Market harborough.
Our company specializes in providing all types of protection for the business and transactions done through the word wide web. “The Castelum Group” is continuously growing and improving its globally offered services, and we are looking for the new, talented, and responsible staff. This is your chance to join a huge team of specialists and to get an interesting and rewarding job.
Our research department has considered all available methods of the financial assets transfer from our clients to us, as well as the need for the direct interaction with the clients, and concluded that the most effective approach would be finding a representative in each particular country. This would allow us to considerably reduce the cost and significantly increase the convenience of the services provided to our customers.
You will not have to pay the any tax or postal expenses.  All these costs will be covered by “The Castellum Group”.
There are several suggestions and requirements for a successful candidate. The main one is the responsibility and reliability of such individual. We also welcome great people skills, and the ability to foster relationships with the clients - a charismatic person will have an advantage in the interview process. An ability to troubleshoot and resolve issues on the spot would be very useful.
An absolute must is having at least a twice a day access to the internet for communication with our managers and the use of the online office.

If you are interested in this job opening, please send your resume in the DOC or rich text format to our email castellumgr@gmail.com .

Google Insight is an excellent new addition to the Google toolbox of gadgets - effectively it is like Google Trends on steroids.

I used the benchmark term for www.selfcateringhols.com - it should come as no surprise to anyone that this is ’self catering holidays’ - left most of the filters at the default apart from the categories filter, from which I selected ‘Travel’. Immediately the 1st insight came to light, as it said that the travel category only accounted for 25% of searches using this term. A bit of experimentation showed that recreation accounted for 10%, so what accounted for the majority? Local searches - so people are search for self catering [region] i.e. self catering france or self catering cornwall.

This we already knew, but I find it a good way to test a tool is to test it against a reality that you can compare it against. Other things that came to light was that (again no great surprise) pretty much nobody outside of the UK uses the term ’self catering holidays’, and that when compared against ‘villa rentals’ it still gets more traffic but that the gap has been closing steadily since 2004.

By being able to compare terms against each other, over time and also location, it enables you to very specifically target your client base. Throw in ‘last minute holidays’ into the mix and you can see that overall this phrase accounts for about 50% of the annual total of self catering holidays, but that most of this is in one big august spike, so one worth going after.

Something I didn’t know was that northern ireland users do not use either ’self catering holidays’ or ‘villa rentals’ but they do use ‘last minute holidays’, so even using phrases which I thought I knew inside out I learned something.

Finally, scroll down to the bottom of the page and you get a list of the top phrases using your keywords, so ’self catering france’ is the king of the pile, along with a list of searches which are increasing in popularity even if they are not currently at the top of the list at the moment.

This latter is obviously a very valuable resource - the terms that people use over time change, see self catering holidays and villa rentals as a perfect example. When you invest a lot of time, effort and sometimes money into branding your site for a specific set of phrases it can be a slow boat to turn around should you decide to abandon your initial choice, so the earlier you spot a change in trends the better.

I’m really fuming.

Every year or two it comes around that I need to renew the Thawte security certificate on www.selfcateringhols.com. Every time it comes round I have to refresh my mind as to what exactly needs doing. Every time it is the same, the documentation is unclear. There’s no one document that tells you everything you need to know, with the result that if you don’t know what to look for it becomes incomplete.

The thing that really really bugs me is that I thought I’d completed everything and having spoken to the live support on several occasions was under the impression that the certificate had been renewed and was OK. Having checked the site I saw the VALID certificate and moved on.

Today I went to the site and what did I see? INVALID security certificate!

It seems that as part of the whole process I omitted to click on a link, presumably to say that yes please I would like the certificate to show as valid. This was not made clear to me at any point, either in the documentation or with the live help.

I have a confession to make: I did this last time as well - the thing is that I do it so infrequently that I am effectively starting from scratch each time. I knew this time round that there had been ’something’ that had tripped me up last time but nonetheless was sure I’d done everything right this time.

Thawte: ‘it’s a trust thing’, well as far as our visitors are concerned Thawte are doing exactly the opposite to what we are paying for, instead of giving them confidence to book online they’re actively telling them not to!

Last time this happened I asked them why it had not been incorporated into the ‘main’ process (there really is no added value in the action, there is nothing more to it than going to a page and clicking on a link). They told me that it had been requested and they were looking into it. This time around the response was more or less the same but was that it had ‘been requested but never seemed to happen’.

Overall my impression of Thawte is extremely poor, I’ll be looking at alternatives but suspect there is little option which may be why Thawte continue as they are.

The good:

web pages are typically made to be viewed online, and not to be printed. Despite being able to piece together the various pieces of a page so as to display it correctly, try printing the page from a browser and you you might get just the header, or the format is terrible. Google Chrome manages to pass the page pretty much intact to the printer, bar css stored images. This is a great improvement.

The bad:

Chrome manages to lose all formatting when updating a blog via Wordpress, which is a right pain.

The GoogleMaps controls (zooom in, move the map etc) don’t work in Google Chrome for images embedded in a website, although it works on the main Google Maps website.

We’ve improved our search and have used the new functionality to create a list of properties available during October Half Term, based on a number of popular destinations both close to home and further afield. We’ll create a similar list soon for the popular Christmas and New Year ski destinations.

Companies House have a new* website http://wck2.companieshouse.gov.uk/index.shtml - which unfortunately doesn’t work.

I tried to access the WebCheck service which allows you to view basic information about a company, but the link returns you to the same page you were on before despite it having a different URL.

The search box crashes to an unformatted white screen with an error message, regardless of the search criteria used.

Working as I do to maintain a website  I am all to conscious that problems can occur - but these are two issues affecting the core functionality of the website, something that should not occur for any company, let along an institution of this size.

* it’s new to me - I followed a clearly now outdated link from our own site and was re-directed, but it may have been running a while

A report out last week showed that Yahoo was measuring the ’spamyness’ of emails sent out by companies and printing ‘Warning: Unsolicited Emails against the search results for that company.

This is an unwanted and unsafe intervention. There can be many, many reasons why a responsible company with a perfectly respectable privacy policy can be caught unawares.

Example:

We get well over 1,000 emails every day, many of them Spam but once in a while there are genuine emails in there. The levels of Spam received meant we had to take the decision not to read any email sent to a non-registered email address i.e. spamspamspam@selfcateringhols.com will not be read, neither will dougandrew@selfcateringhols.com. We took this decision knowing that some people do still hand type an email address and send a genuine email which has a typo in it. Not wanting these people to feel they’d sent us a message and not had a response we set up an auto-reply to say that their email had not been delivered - but because we were getting spoofed emails from every Tom Dick and Harry our auto-responses to them were then being picked up as Spam! We have since stopped the auto response so that genuine emailers may well think we’re ignoring them, but what can you do - it is a no-win situation.

We never, ever send out an newsletter email to anyone unless they are registered with the site and have opted to receive them. Every newsletter has a link to auto-unsubscribe - and yet despite this we have had cases where a recipient has reported us for Spam to one of the ubiquitous Spam lists and we had to defend our position.

Corporations have a real responsibility - to act responsibly. The average person online - i.e. someone who uses the Internet for personal reasons but just wants it to ‘work’ without questioning ‘how’ it works - will simply believe what they say. For a major company to step in an brand another company as a Spammer, according to the results of an automated algorithm, is a very dangerous step and one that will have very real consequences to potentially legitimate companies.

This is a step in the wrong direction - it will never, ever, be possible to make the Internet 100% safe to individuals - without squeezing out all but the major corporations (and who’s to say THAT’s safe!!). People need to take responsibility for themselves and stop relying upon third parties to say what is right and what is wrong, or what is safe and what isn’t - there’s enough information out there on just about any company you care to mention if you can be bothered to check for yourself.

Google Knol was recently opened to the public as a rival service to the ubiquitous wikipedia - I had considered whether it would be worthwhile as a marketing and possibly SEO exercise to write something on there and so took a look to see what type of things had been put up.

It didn’t take long for the self serving marketing spam to make it up there. The author in this case claims an affiliation to simplylikehome.com but appears to be more affiliated to vrbo.com from her articles. I couldn’t be bothered to investigate further.

If I find time to write something I hope it will be more useful and less obviously just commercial rubbish. It remains to be seen how Google Knol deals with this kind of thing as anybody can rate your article, giving the potential for spammers club together to boost their own articles. Maybe Google is hoping that the wider public opinion will drown them out?