What can you recommend?

Here’s the scenario.  I have been using Spamarrest.com for several years quite happily, for a number of my domains.  But in the past twelve months I feel they’ve changed something in the system.  I was previously able to approve single messages sent from me (test newsletters for example) without a spate of spam also being delivered. Spammers love to use other people’s addresses, you know.  And then some email went missing. I checked with my webhost/mail server and the mail was leaving the server so presumably it was going through spamarrest’s system but not getting to me.  I checked that addresses weren’t blacklisted and were approved, but still nothing.

So I’ve been trying some other systems, with little satisfaction. I’ve tried a number of programs that you can install on your computer and use through Outlook but that means I end up with copious amounts of junk in my Outlook program that I have to delete. I like things to be tidy and it drives me nuts seeing it there. Then I tried another program that you can use for it to check all your email first before downloading it. This seemed good, but I had to process all email first and was spending (wasting) time processing email. If I’ve already approved people as friends or put them on the white list, I just want the email delivered when it arrives – not get holed up somewhere waiting for me to finish processing junk mail before clicking on ‘process mail’.

So, then I found another service that works entirely online and filters your email before delivery with 99.9% success rate (they say). I’ve seen that they work well for large corporates, telcos, banking institutions, etc. They would be perfect. BUT they charge per user and as I provide email accounts for many of my Virtual Assistant team they just priced themselves out of the bargain.  I’m a sole trader, single operating in a small business. But if I use this service that looks great they need to filter the entire domain – not just the email addresses I use.  That would add considerably to my expenses.

So, now it’s over to you. What can you recommend, remembering my criteria:

• Needs to be web based – I don’t want it downloading to my computer first.
• Needs to let me load a safe list (all my contacts) so that their email won’t get held up and I can go process the rest at my convenience.
• Will deliver my email and not lose it.
• Will allow for emails sent from me to me to be delivered without all the trash from spammers.

Any suggestions?

Are you getting one of these messages?  One of my clients was too with her WordPress blog and nothing I did seemed to help the problem. Did lots of research, asked questions at forums and tried to restore her database once again – she’d already had it done previously.  Checked that the index.php file was in place.

We decided to set up a new webspace with a new domain elsewhere and download all the files via FTP and then upload them to the new webspace.  I was about 1/2 way through the upload when I discovered something.  The webspace I’d set up for her was almost full and I had heaps of files to go.

So I went back to her other webhost and had to do a search in her Account Management system to locate the information relating to her webhosting. Gotta love these hosts that don’t use cpanel for ease of use!  Anyway, I discovered that she had 296mb of files in what was supposed to be a 150mb allotment.  I think I found the problem!

I immediately filled out a support request to her host to find out if in fact I was correct and could they do a temporary disk space increase so we could do a full backup and run a database export.  I emailed my client and told her what I believed I’d found. She’d been told by her host that she’d been hacked and she better upgrade her WordPress.

When I thought about it I remembered an incident a year or two earlier where a small website I was working on (25mbs) gave the same error message when I was trying to switch to a new template I’d uploaded and it took me awhile to figure out why that was.  I should have remembered.

So, if you are experiencing that same error message – before anything else – check your webspace allotment.  If it’s full, get it increased and then rerun whatever it is you’re doing.

Please let me know if this post has helped you as I did a search extensively looking for help on this issue and did not come across the possiblity of the webspace being full – hopefully I can save you the hours I put in to eventually find this out!

500 Internal Error, full webspace, server error, webpage won’t view

If you’re like me, you like to add tags for your keywords when blogging. Firefox had a great add-on that worked but when they upgraded the plugin no longer worked. And Technorati have either stopped or shifted the tag generator they used to have on display when you logged in. But a bit of searching found me one that works a treat and has many facets to it.  Free Tag Generator and Social Bookmark Generator.

I use it often, it’s very easy to use and it’s bookmarked so I can find it all the time.  Thought I’d share the treasure I found with all my readers.

Technorati tag, tag generator, tags for blogging

For the second time in a month I’ve received a message on my wall at my Facebook page saying that my photo had been seen at a site.  The first time I clicked on it unawares and immediately my antivirus program (Trend Micro) warned me of a problem and wouldn’t let me view the page.  I went to the guy who posted a message on my wall and saw there were heaps of wall messages he’d left within a few minutes – a sure sign something was wrong. I left a message for him to say he had a virus and also sent a personal email to him.

I then removed the wall notice from my Facebook so that no-one else would click on it – important you do that!

This morning one of my clients left a similar message and I immediately contacted her and her VA support to advise that one of them had a virus and it had infected the Facebook profile.

I’ve researched articles on it but haven’t found any fixes – just best to keep your antivirus program updated every single day.

Internet News – Facebook Attack

Now Public – Facebook Virus Attacks Again

Reuters – Koobface Virus

And even UrbanLegend is confirming there is a virus.

Facebook has told members to delete contaminated e-mails and has posted directions at www.facebook.com/security on how to clean infected computers.

I have a free online virus scanner (owned by Trend Micro which is the program that saved me from grief) at my site at http://www.acs-webhosting.com/ in the bottom right-hand corner of the page.

Have you heard of Google Alert? If not, it’s an excellent tool for keeping you informed of new articles published on the web with the keywords you’re interested in.  I use it to keep updated on articles published relating to my industry as a Virtual Assistant, but also if anyone writes about me in some way.  I also use it to keep informed on topics of interest to my clients, thereby providing additional service to them.

If you don’t understand how it works, rather than me explaining here, you can go to GoogleGuide to read about it.

So I probably have between 20-30 Google Alerts set up and receive a compiliation of listings for most of those keywords or phrases every day and I can scan through them quickly for items of interest.

However, over the past few months I’ve noticed that none of my posts written on my VA blog get picked up on one of my alerts.  Other alerts pick up on posts I’ve published if my name is included or if other keyword phrases I use are included but for my Virtual Assistant blog they do not show up.  Why?  I have no idea and I’m on a search to try and figure that out.

If I’m not receiving them then I’m not convinced others are too and it means that I’m losing potential audience who might want to know about new blog posts relating to this industry.  I have tried contacting Google about this but, as yet, with no response.  If you have any idea I’d love to hear about it!

Let me set the scene for you:

I manage several database lists for myself and for clients.  And as those lists grow, the numbers are well into the tens of thousands.  So, it’s only to be expected that you’ll get several requests for people to be removed off lists or for their details to be updated.

Today I received an email addressed to one of my clients advising that one of her readers may have received an email addressed to this address or that address and could I please update it to ….?  I spent some time trying to find the various addresses she’d given without success. In the end I emailed her back advising that the very next email she receives from my client simply requires her to click on the Update link at the bottom so she can update her email address.

Now, I get a few requests like this and I’m beginning to wonder what is so hard about clicking on a link at the bottom of the email they’ve received that says ‘cancel’ or ‘update’ and for them to update or cancel accordingly.  I use systems that allow for owners of email addresses to easily manage their subscriptions – it’s also designed to try and ease the load for us too.

I mean, I do that when I no longer want to be on a list or change an email and I don’t expect the owner of lists to maintain my addresses for me. So should I be expected to do the same?

And whilst I’m on the subject of maintaining my own email addresses on lists, I particularly dislike being made to login (therefore having to create a username and password) simply to get off someone’s list. Why should I have to register to unsubscribe? The reality is that often these people have just put me on their lists and if I click on an unsubscribe link find I have to prove I am the owner of that address and fill out information I don’t want to have to fill out.  Or am I just being pedantic?

What are your thoughts about who should manage the ownership of subscriptions?

mailing lists, email subscriptions, managing lists, email addresses

Perhaps it’s the mood I’m in but there are some things that really irk me on the web.  Not only that but I suspect they annoy other people too and may be the reason why some people don’t get the signups or responses they’re looking for.

Today it was a mom’s membership website – I wanted to join as a member sometime ago but couldn’t get past their sign up process so gave up and forgot about it. Today I get a reminder to say I hadn’t completed the process so I went back to try and work out why I couldn’t complete my registration.

Ahhh, now I remember.  Because my Australian postcode does not fit their requirements for a zipcode it won’t accept it and therefore will not allow me to complete my registration.  I wrote back to them and asked them if they really want members outside their own country?

Make a note – if you want signups on your form for your website then make sure it allows people from all countries to sign up – not just your own!

It happened! The unimaginable!  I’d been creating new blogs in WordPress 2.6 and slowly getting used to the new look and Dashboard changes and thought I would upgrade some of my blogs to this new version. I did a couple and they worked well so I decided to upgrade this one too.  That’s when it happened.  My categories went missing!  And I didn’t know how to get them back again.

They weren’t showing in the menu sidebar – just an empty spot and when I logged into the Dashboard and viewed the Categories list, there were rows of empty tickboxes with no names and a number at the end of each line indicating the number of posts for that invisible category listing.

Searches at WordPress Support didn’t come up with any answers for me, although many were asking for help on the same thing, but Googling did produce some results with some step-by-steps on how to fix the problem.  But there were steps missing!  The first part was relatively easy and I was able to successfully make changes inside phpMyAdmin and get the categories list showing but there was no explanation on how to link the tables back up (perhaps that knowledge was assumed by the writers) and since I’ve never done it before I was not going to attempt something with no clear instructions on what to do next.

They also assumed that you had a backup file you could use to find out what all your categories were – wrong!  Mine isn’t writeable to the directory so I have xml files I have exported and can import but don’t have a back up file to refer to.  I must fix that issue one day too!

However, I discovered a really easy way of doing it in WordPress, and thought I’d share it here for those who are not game to fiddle with the database on their server.

I did a manual fix.

1. After thinking about this a great deal I decided to create a new category to see what would happen.  It showed – that was good.
2. So I placed one of my posts with that and that worked.
3. Then I ticked all the other blank categories listed and clicked on the delete button. Everything automatically defaulted to ‘uncategorised’ which was still showing as blank (and is not removeable) but I knew that the first listing there was the uncategorised list.
4. After that I recreated my categories and reconnected everything – there were 118 posts so that wasn’t too bad and only took me 2-3 hours to do.

The good thing about this was I got to rethink all the categories I have listed here and reconnected some posts to belong to more than one category so in effect, my blog got tidied up in the process.

So, if you are too scared to touch the real techy side of your blog and want a fix that you can do, without calling in help, the above should work for you – it did for me!

missing categories, categories invisible, WordPress 2.6

As a Virtual Assistant, I love exploring new programs but am sometimes skeptical towards some until I hear from others of their own personal experiences. Free programs I do view warily until proven otherwise, I don’t want to get caught with something I wished I hadn’t downloaded.

However, recently my team were discussing a photo storing program called Picasa which is a free download from Google and it is worth checking out. It does a full scan of your computer or will only scan the sections you specify. So, if you have photos you don’t want suddenly exposed using this program, it would be best if they were not in your My Documents folder or any of the folders you want the program to go through.

Once it’s collated all that information you can view them in year order or alphabetical order and sort them into categories, or whatever. It has this great facility for collecting your chosen pictures for emailing them, or create an html file which you can upload to a webspace (your own webspace that is) for sending out to anyone. It has 3 different background colours (grey, black and white) and 2 different layouts. I expect since it converts them into html you could fiddle with them afterwards and make changes – I haven’t done that yet, but I like how easily it creates the thumbnails with a viewing screen.

This program could save you a lot of time if you work with images for clients and need to quickly upload images in a suitable format for viewing. If you also work with photo blogs or other sites that have a lot of images in it, this would be a worthwhile tool to work with. I had a bit of fun with it as you’ll see if you click on this link. KMT

Picasa, images album, photo blog, free download

Who’s to say whose time is more important?

I am really fed up with the amount of telemarketers who call, using the predictive dialler method. I mean, telemarketers at the best of times aren’t my favourite callers but when I answer a call only to be left with a dead line and having to wait to find out who called me is a gross disrespect for my time and I don’t like it. I know they might think it’s only a short period of time but it adds up over the days and the weeks and is disruptive. I don’t care if what they are calling about is important and perhaps I might be interested in what they have to offer, but it starts them off on the wrong foot immediately and I usually let them know that. I mean, why should I answer a call and then have to wait for the other person to come to me? I feel it’s rude and a disrespect for my time – and I am a prospective client, aren’t I?  What do you think? KMT

predictive dialler, waste of time, telemarketer