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entries for 2002/10/14
mentors
To be a successful businessman, you have to be honest and you
have to have integrity. Plus, you must have the old-fashioned
sense to give customers what they really want.
That quote is from Kevin Abel, in an Atlanta Business Chronicle article from last April.
Here's a goofy picture of him from another article.
Kevin was my boss for almost five years before I started cornerhost.
Reading that quote made me laugh, because it sounds so much like
my own philosophy. I don't think I'd approach business quite the
same way if I'd never worked at his company.
I haven't talked to him in ages...30 seconds!!
It now takes me about 30 seconds to set up a new account (down from five minutes or so, last time I checked). It takes about 2 seconds to add a domain to someone's account. I should have built this admin panel months ago!
directory harvest attacks
This is interesting: What are Directory Harvest Attacks?
During a DHA, spammers attempt to deliver messages to multiple addresses, such as johndoe@yourcompany.com, jdoe@yourcompany.com, and john@yourcompany.com. Addresses that are not rejected by the receiving mail server are determined as valid. These addresses are complied and sold to other spammers worldwide. Within hours, a brand new email box can be full of unsolicited, junk email.
A lot of people think that their ISP's sell their mailboxes. I
thought that myself about mindspring, because I'd get hundreds
of spam messages and never once used the address. I'm
sure some ISP's do sell their customers' data, but
this type of attack offers an alternate explanation.
change of plans
For the past few weeks, my plan has been to spend every day until
the end of the year doing nothing but automation. This week, I threw together an admin panel so I can do my most common jobs from the web.
The code is far from perfect, but it's all down hill from here.
Mostly I just need to refactor so the customer control panel
can share the logic, and the customers can do even more things
by themselves.
I'm still going to work on this, but I'll scale back my efforts,
and put more energy into marketing and product development.
Speaking of product development, I'd planned to work on
Rantelope this week, but I'm putting that on hold
indefinitely while I rethink my business plan.