Things are growing yet again at work and with it the number of people needed to keep things flowing smoothly. This time it’s the Sales Engineer team that needs a new person, working in the Baltimore/Washington area (our home office):

Responsibilities

• Provide exemplary pre-sales technical expertise through technical and product presentations, product demonstrations, pilot implementations, beta program administration, consistent communication, and on-going technical consultation.
• Translate complex technical problems for non-technical clients as well as translating non-technical specifications into precise technical requirements.
• Meet with clients to evaluate their current systems and needs and make recommendations for software and hardware and integration.
• Travel approximately 30% in support of sales and customer activities.
• Respond to RFIs, RFPs and serve as …

According to the MailChimp blog there’s a new program in place at Gmail that allows images in a message to be turned on by default with the following requirements:

• There has to be authentication in place (either SPF or DKIM).
• The recipient has to have sent at least 2 messages in the past to the sender.

Now that second one can be a challenge since a lot of senders do not use a reply-to address that their customers are sending to (in fact many use a noreply address), meaning that none of their subscribers will accumulate two sends and therefore never see images on by default.

Essentially senders need to start using a reply-to address that customers can use, and ideally one that they would otherwise use. As an example a support@ address would be used independently of the mailing, adding the …

Have you ever wanted to fire off a post from your phone, Blackberry, Outlook at work…? Following on from Comment Reply Via Email we’re introducing our latest feature to make it even easier to publish to your blog: Post by Email.

Maybe you’re on holiday and want to show your journey. Maybe you’ve captured something with your cell phone that you just have to share. Maybe you’re at work and should be doing something else. With Post by Email you can keep everyone up-to-date without even opening a browser.

Post by Email is super simple to use. From the new My Blogs menu you can generate special email addresses:

You can create as many email addresses as you need, one for each blog you have access to.

Now for the fun part – send an email!

You can send email …

As you may know, Open Query is entirely self-funded, which means the banks owe OQ and me money not vice versa. Things like interest rates are of little concern, which is helpful in volatile times! Of course I do rely on my bank staying in business, but that's now subject to a government guarantee in Australia so I'll just have to go with that for now ;-)

So far, OQ has not experienced much from the economic troubles. But I'll tell you about the possible encounters, since I think they're of interest and lessons can be learnt.

We give away one book to each student at a training day, that is, provided they've paid on time (basically a personalised quick payment bonus). I've got a small shortlist of decent books, but generally I've been handing out copies of …

Today I’ve managed to finish initial version of our bounces-handler package we use for mailing-related stuff in Scribd.

Bounces-handler package is a simple set of scripts to automatically process email bounces and ISP‘s feedback loops emails, maintain your mailing blacklists and a Rails plugin to use those blacklists in your RoR applications.

This piece of software has been developed as a part of more global work on mailing quality improvement in Scribd.com, but it was one of the most critical steps after setting up reverse DNS records, DKIM and SPF.

The package itself consists of two parts:

• Perl scripts to process incoming email:
  • bounces processor — could be …

If you haven't heard of Digsby yet, you have probably been living in some kind of a virtual cave or have no friends. Digsby is a multi-network instant messenger application, similar to Trillian, Pidgin (GAIM), or Miranda. I said 'similar', so what makes Digsy special? Reviews I read so far don't give the real reasons and don't dive into the features in depth. Instead, you get a standard load of marketing BS and in the end to you, the user, Digsby may end up being "yet another IM program." Some reviews describe certain features, but so far I haven't seen one that highlighted THE MAIN REASON why Digsby is different. And may I preface it with: finally somebody got a clue. I never before wanted to write about any other IM client, which already indicates that on the "this is the most awesome meter ever" meter, Digsby is floating somewhere at the top. …

I am very confused.

I subscribe to several email lists including MySQL and Ruby on Rails lists. Generally, I keep my mailbox clean except for a folder in which I was archiving messages Ruby on Rails.

A few days ago I noticed that my Ruby on Rails folder reached 65535 messages. Today, I was looking to reply to an email from Keith Murphy (to which I had previously replied as well) and was surprised to find that the particular message didn't show up in my search. This particular message was sent on April 30 so I started scanning all my emails received on that day.

Surprisingly, I didn't find it even after a careful visual scan. Not only that, I noticed several of emails I received in the last 2 weeks missing. My initial reply to Keith was still sitting in my Sent mail folder. My trash folder also had several emails that I had deleted but not the ones that were missing.

For the life of me I …

Virtual Hosting Howto With Virtualmin On CentOS 5.1

This tutorial shows how to set up a CentOS 5.x server to offer all services needed by virtual web hosters. These include web hosting, smtp server with (SMTP-AUTH and TLS, SPF, DKIM, Domainkeys), DNS, FTP, MySQL, POP3/IMAP, Firewall, Webalizer for stats.

Virtual Hosting Howto With Virtualmin On CentOS 5.1

This tutorial shows how to set up a CentOS 5.x server to offer all services needed by virtual web hosters. These include web hosting, smtp server with (SMTP-AUTH and TLS, SPF, DKIM, Domainkeys), DNS, FTP, MySQL, POP3/IMAP, Firewall, Webalizer for stats.

I recently upgraded an install of PHP Free Chat to that latest version of 1.0 Final. However it was still lacking a feature to notify individual(s) that someone has joined the chat if they were not already in the chat application to begin with. I came across a posting explaining how to achieve this in PHP Free Chat at PHP Free Chat Forum. After a little reading and discussion I was able to implement the feature.

Here’s my modified version for the solution based on the forum posting. The pfcmail() function can be made to be way more versatile for any use, however for my use it was made to be simple and produce properly formated email messages.

Solution

1. Create a new PHP file called pfcmail.php with the following lines of code.

2. …