June 2007

Dear Client,

The ongoing war against spam tends to have its ups and downs. We have a filtering service that works quite well but tends to punish mail administrators who don’t know how to set up their servers properly. One bright spot reported this last Thursday was the arrest of one of the biggest spammers on the planet. If any number of the charges brought against him stick, he will spend the next few decades behind bars. YES!!! As far as spammers go, this one was one of the worst. Over the last few years you almost certainly have gotten spam from him…repeatedly. Hats off to the investigators who tracked him down, as the better ones are incredibly difficult to build a case on. You can read more about it at: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/317795_soloway31.html.

We are working on putting up another website content management system that was recommended by one of our developers. These are web applications that allow you to build a website w/o having a lot of development background. While the results may not be quite as good as a professionally designed site, in many cases, it’s close enough. Will let you know our progress as we continue working with it.

The last few days we have noticed an unusual increase in traffic to a couple of our webservers. We are trying to determine if it is normal growth or something odd. So far we haven’t seen anything obvious, and have limited the impact of this traffic increase so it won’t affect other services such as email.

Speaking of email, this is a good time to point out that when you send an attachment such as an image, the size of that image gets converted automatically to something half again as large in order to send it. In fact, any file such as a spreadsheet, Autocad drawing, or video clip becomes quite large. And when you send that to 100 people, 100 copies of this huge file are created. As a result this can have a significant, detrimental impact on high priority business mail. A week or so, we had several clients send similar video clips to a few hundred of their closest friends, virtually shutting down our mail server for any other traffic. We had to kill most of this mail once we found out what happened. If you want to send out something like that, call us first. We have a couple of suggestions that will make it hundreds of times more efficient. Thanks for your cooperation.

The new vegetable garden is doing quite well. The pepper plants are growing fine, as are the sunflowers and the tomato plants. We’ve had perhaps a half dozen tomato plants die for unexplained reasons, which leaves us with well over 50 still growing. My only mistake so far was failing to trellis them in time. Finding ripe tomatoes is going to be a challenging “Easter egg” hunt as they mature! Corn is waist high now and the cucumbers are climbing the trellis.

Hope you have a great month!

Sincerely,

Ben Conner