Just reading an interesting piece over on ISP Review entitled Marketers Complain Legitimate Email Blocked as SPAM by UK ISPs

It’s not the argument of what constitutes Spam – we’re all different – but I did find myself agreeing strongly with one of their conclusions: “we do encourage any ISP that deploys anti-spam filtering to give its customers some degree of control over which addresses it applies to; even if that is merely in the form of a basic “on” and “off” switch.”

We’d strongly agree with that sentiment – and being able to select the level of filtering (from ‘Low’ to ‘Extreme’) has always been a core feature of our filtering platform here at The Very Good Email Company, along with the ability to view and restore any removed mail from the customers’ Spam folder.

Iain

As stated by the Chancellor in his Pre-Budget Report  on 9th December, the standard rate of VAT will return to 17.5% on January 1st 2010. We are therefore updating our invoicing and payment platforms to reflect this.

If you currently pay for services from The Very Good Email Company, such as Faxtastic, or any of our other email services, through Worldpay you will receive an update directly from them advising you of the amount to be paid. You will need to do nothing and changes in charges we make will take effect from midnight on December 31st.

On a happier note we hope you have a wonderful Christmas and New Year!

Like many businesses we’re having a few problems getting into the office today and some staff are working remotely. If you call us and don’t get an answer – please drop us an email and we will respond as quickly and efficiently as possible: support@verygoodemail.com or sales@verygoodemail.com

It’s funny – sat here at home with snow falling and having pretty well full office functionality (apart from the good company and blistering wit of course) and all I can see and hear is people griping about the weather and the road system that happens to have ground to a halt.

According to some it’s all the government’s fault. How dare we not have the infrastructure in place to make sure everything runs normally. We’re supposed to be a first world economy and so many other countries get far worse weather and yet still carry on. Well – perhaps that’s the point – would the same people welcome increased taxes to pay for a lot of extra gritting hardware that gets used once or twice a year?

Surely the answer is better use of technology to enable those that work in office environments to work remotely when the need arises – and, of course, a quality email platform is key!

Now – I wonder where I can find one of those?

Iain

While filtering methods for spam are now quite effective, a new breed of spammers has evolved  and their spam evades many filters. It is time to target the next great spam problem; “snowshoe” spam.

Like a snowshoe spreads the load of a traveller across a wide area of snow, snowshoe spamming is a technique used by spammers to spread spam output across many IPs and domains, in order to dilute reputation metrics and evade filters.

Snowshoers use many fictitious business names, fake names and identities, and frequently changing postal dropboxes and voicemail drops. Conversely, legitimate mailers try hard to build brand reputation based on a real business address, a known domain and a small permanent range of sending IPs. Snowshoers often use anonymised or unidentifiable whois records, whereas legitimate senders are proud to provide their bona-fide identity.

As one of our spam filtering ‘layers’ we use the Spamhaus Project and we are using their recently introduced Spamhaus CSS – A dedicated Snowshoe component of the Spamhaus Block List.

A few months ago, a few of us went to a major trade show in London. Not the most exciting thing you may think, and you’d be right. Wandering around with our over-priced coffees, what struck us was the sheer amount of companies with invented or at best extremely abstract names. Names that bore no relation to what they did. Names that were, frankly, rubbish. This led to an amusing game of ‘guess what the company does’ based on a cursory glance at the stand. Let’s face it, when a company calls itself ‘Genistar’ with a tag line of ‘Unlock your customer’s potential’, what attracts you to that stand? What do they do?

Isn’t this Marketing 101? If you build a stand for a show and the whole purpose of that stand is to attract as many people as possible, shouldn’t that stand be able to explain what you do within a second’s glance? I believe it is called ‘advertising’.

When Eastman renamed his company ‘Kodak’, it was a stroke of genius. Invented words as company names were unheard of, it was not open to mis-pronunciation and was extremely memorable. He created a superb brand not by inventing a word but by bucking the trend.

Last month we were ‘APM Internet’. This has been a name of convenience for us for some time and has suited its purpose as we have slowly and consistently built the company up over the last few years. Recently, however, we’ve found ourselves falling fault of exactly the same problem the exhibitors have. If we had a stand at the show and plastered up ‘APM Internet’ everywhere, what good would it do? We realised that we needed to tell a story. We needed to explain, in one short sentence, what we did and the attitude with which we do it.

Today we are ‘The Very Good Email Company’.

We decided on this name for many reasons. Firstly, there’s no debate about what we do. Secondly, you can’t mis-spell or (hopefully) forget it. Most importantly, it gives you an idea of the type of team we are. This is not a cocky attitude or marketing ‘mist’, it’s a bar; a level of achievement we are setting for ourselves. It’s not about assuming the right to refer to ourselves as ‘very good’ but rather a title we intend to continuously earn from our customers.

We’re all excited about this new image for the company. We’ve got a lot of plans we’ll be sharing with you soon. This new website and name are just the start. In the meantime, please pardon our dust as the rebrand process gets underway. There’s lots to update and it’ll take some time to complete.

After all, we’ll want the results to be Very Good.

PJ