Ed Ross

Tonsho Feature: Multiple email addresses

We've added a new Tonsho feature for professional accounts.  It's now possible to add multiple email addresses to your Tonsho account.  This means that you can send out emails from any of the email addresses listed.  You can also fetch mail from any of the sub accounts and use the spam filtering. This uses the same allowed contacts lists for all the accounts.

For example consider a user called Bob, who has three addresses: bob@mycompany.com, info@mycompany.com and bob@personaladdress.com.  Lets say Bob signed up for Tonsho with the address bob@mycompany.com, so this is the master email address for Bob's Tonsho account.  Initially Bob can only send email originating from bob@mycompany.com.  By adding the email addresses info@mycompany.com and bob@personaladdress.com Bob will also be able to send outbound mail from these addresses.

Now lets consider the spam filtering. Imagine that Bob adds a new email address to his allowed contact list from a new correspondent alice@widgets_r_us.com (this could happen when Bob send an email to Alice or when Alice sends one to Bob and responds to the challenge mail). Because all of the sub email addresses share the same allowed contacts list, this means that Alice is now allowed to send to info@mycompany.com and bob@personaladdress.com (as well as bob@mycompany.com) without receiving any further challenge emails.

More False Positives

In spam filtering a false positive is when valid mail is incorrectly identified as junk and you loose valid email.  I find it frustrating and I'm not the only one. Marketing Guru Seth Godin has discovered that he's loosing google checkout orders to the gmail spam filter and that notes he sent to internship candidates didn't get through. His conclusion:

Stopping spam is a worthless endeavor when you also stop non-spam.

Tolerating some noise and shoplifting and cranky customers is part of the deal. Better to be too open than too closed, I think.

Tonsho takes a different tack - every new contact is challenged to authenticate as human. Is this a slight hassle? Yes. Is it better to know that someone who genuine wants to contact you can? I think so.

Lets assume that both Seth and his interns were using Tonsho. Probably the interns would have emailed Seth their application first and received a challenge.  Would they have bother to authenticate?  Absolutely!  When you send outbound mail, the addressee is pre-authenticated, so Seth's reply would have breezed through without any problems.

Giving users the opportunity to prove they are genuine means that your mail can come through and that's essential.

Publishing Media Files to the Web

Do you find yourself wanting to quickly publish a media file to the web, so that you can link to it from on online forum, email or web page?

"I need to put up a webpage allowing visitors to download an MP3 file. My current host doesn't allow MP3 files to be downloaded (just my luck) so I need to find a host who will. All I want to do is send a few of my customers to that page to get the download (around 40MB)."
- Catriona Brand of Brand Financial Training & Money Skills For Women

Our large file emailing service, Tonsho provides a great way to do this.  Just email the file to yourself and cut and paste the link where-ever you want.

Make sure that Tonsho is configured not to add a password - login to Tonsho and go to the 'Options Page', 'File Attachments' area and turn the 'Password protect files' check-box off.  To make the file stay there for longer than six months - select your sent file and click on 'Make permanent' on the 'Sent Files' page.

"I spent an entire day trying to find a service that would allow my customers to download files which didn't use my website and which was reliable.  Then I discovered Tonsho.  It was so easy to use, I just emailed the files to myself using Tonsho and then the links to the files were emailed to me.  I just pasted the links into an email to my customers and that was it!  And my customers are thanking me for providing the downloads so quickly and without any hassle!  I will certainly be using Tonsho for all my download requirements in the future and would strongly recommend them."
Catriona Brand
Brand Financial Training  www.brandft.co.uk
Money Skills For Women  www.moneyskillsforwomen.co.uk

New Tonsho Feature: Notification on Every Mail

We've added new features to our Tonsho.com spam-filtering for even easier control.

You can now choose to receive notification of every blocked mail (see image 1 below). This is in addition to the existing options to receive daily, weekly or monthly summaries.  The new setting is rea ch by logging in to tonsho.com, clicking on the "Options" menu, then the "Spam Filter" sub-menu. The notification mails now include an 'allow' link for each entry, to add any contact to your allowed list with a single-click (see image 2 below). Receiving notification mails on every blocked mail is likely to be suitable for users with lower volumes of spam.

A good tip is to set up filters in your email client (e.g. Thunderbird or Outlook) to move mails with the title "Tonsho Blocked Email Notification" to a single folder, where you can review them when you are expecting a mail from an automated mailer after placing an order online.

We've now sent out over 4500 challenges, saving our users valuable time!

1. Screen-shot showing the new notification frequency option:

2. Screen-shot showing the new allow links:

sKANKT Promotion, Poster Design

I read a great book recently - The Non Designers Design Book.  It gives rules and reasoning for making graphical design decisions.

I soon got the opportunity to put the ideas into practice when working with my brother Dan on our joint promotion of his band sKANKT and RossTech's emailing service Tonsho. I think it worked a treat, but I'll let you judge for yourselves and leave comments.

The credit for the design goes to my brother, he did all the actual manipulation, my input was just to bug him with mails suggesting changes.

Here are the design stages and the emailed suggestions.

Version 1

Hi Dan,

I have some ideas from the design book which may help.

The repeated dots are good - its good to use repeating elements in the design.

The text should have more contrast.  Find the main parts "Tell your mates about SKANKt" and "www.skankt.com/tonsho" and make them big and bold. One at the top, one at the bottom will bounce the eye and keep it in the page.  Make all other text much smaller, mabye even 8pt - if people are going to read it they will read it if its small.  The smaller text will make it look better and help the main points stand out.

Don't worry about filling the page - allow some white space for structure.

Alignment - There is a mixture of left and centre alignment.  Try left or right aligning the centred parts.  (The indented parts are fine)

Interest - we could use a photo from a gig (maybe the one I took of the crowd surfing at coleford).  I would add a 'photo mount border' and try tilting it at an angle and making it really big, so it bursts out of the flyer.  The photo will communicate the idea of sending the photo, quicker than the text.

Ed.

Version 2

Hi Dan,

Much better! The frame for the photo is cool.

Some more changes:

Sent -> Send
Lower case S's in share and send
More white space needed between photo and text
Suggest putting the Share & Send items together under the photo - to give repetion and grouping
Drop the line "To find out how..."
Be bold, try make the photo bigger - let it go off the page even
Make the tonsho logo smaller - try maybe half the size
.... I'd like to see it at this stage to see how the following impact

Remove the border - having stuff in the corners is constraining and forces the centering
Align all elements either to the left or right (e.g. url and logo right aligned, everything else left aligned)
Use the cool SKANKt colours and texture from the border to form horizontal or vertical strips that highlight sections of the design. For example "Tell your mates about SKANKt:" could be highlighted with a yellow background, maybe not quite straight. Almost like a tear across the page. The URL could have the same effect with a yellow background, maybe at a slightly different angle.

Ed.

Version 3

Lunch-time Entertainment: Robot Orchestra

This is cool - ping pong balls fire at a xylophone and and then roll back down into the firing mechanism.

Bot-nets and Spam

According to this cnet news report on sources of spam:

European spam networks have pumped out more unsolicited e-mail than those in the U.S. for the third month in a row...

Wider broadband penetration in Europe has lead to increases in gangs running bot-nets - networks of virus compromised computers. These bot-nets are used to send out spam from the compromised machines. One the largest of these bot-nets was created by the storm worm. It is in response to these bot-nets that some ISPs (Internet Service Providers) have shut down port 25, the standard port used for smtp. Which effectively cuts out part of their support for the Internet protocols (TCP/IP) they are supposed to provide.

Also on cnet, Russia has overtaken China as the largest malware distributor. Malware can includes virus' to create bot-nets and other malicious software, such as spyware designed to steal passwords or sensitive information.

Our spam protection system, Tonsho, effectively filters spam by authenticating that senders are real human users, not zombie machines sending out junk. Visit Tonsho.com to get as free trial.

Relocating a jsp application

This post is about allowing your jsp web application to be installed in different folders.  Lets say the web application is called myapp and the domain is www.acmewebapps.com. We could have different locations for the application:

1. The default folder: www.acmewebapps.com/myapp/index.jsp
2. The root folder: www.acmewebnapps.com/index.jsp
3. Custom folder: www.acmewebapps.com/myapp2/index.jsp

We can move the location of the web application by changing the "Context" entry in the tomcat servers.xml:

1. Default: <Context docBase="myapp" path="myapp" reloadable="true"="org.eclipse.jst.j2ee.server:myapp" />
2. Root: <Context docBase="myapp" path="" reloadable="true"="org.eclipse.jst.j2ee.server:myapp" />
3. Custom: <Context docBase="myapp" path="myapp2" reloadable="true"="org.eclipse.jst.j2ee.server:myapp" />

The trouble is that changing the location of the application changes the references to pages within the application.  Probably the links in your application use relative references, but these can be tricky to get just right.

On the client side we might have different types of link like:

• Css resource: <link type="text/css" href="includes/style.css">
• Script link: <script type="text/javascript" src="includes/util.js">
• Regular hyperlink: <a href="about.jsp>About</a>

We could also have server side includes like:

• <jsp:include page="/includes/header.jsp">

The server side links are easy, just include a leading slash and tomcat will look for the page in the context root folder of the web application.

For client side includes add "<%=request.getContextPath()%>/" and then use the relative path in your web app. This will allow your web app to be redeployed to any folder.

Why this way? For client side links the full path is created by the web browser. If the relative url starts with a slash then it is added to the domain of the referring page.  If the relative url doesn't start with a slash then the it is added to the path of the referring page. Lets assume that we want to link to a style sheet with url:

www.acmewebapps.com/myapp/includes/style.css

For example consider these links from the page www.acmewebapps.com/myapp/index.jsp:

• href="/includes/style.css" gives www.acmewebapps.com/includes/style.css Incorrect, missing web application folder
• href="includes/style.css" gives www.acmewebapps.com/myapp/includes/style.css Correct

The first style without a leading slash works, since the context root of the web application is kept. But note that the second style, with the leading slash only works if the web application root is in the root of the domain - in this example the myapp folder is missing.

However, the first style also has drawbacks if referencing a page from a different subfolder, consider links from a page in the admin subfolder www.acmewebapps.com/admin/config.jsp:

• href="includes/style.css" gives www.acmewebapps.com/myapp/admin/includes/style.css Incorrect, extra folder in path
• href="/includes/style.css" still gives www.acmewebapps.com/includes/style.css Incorrect, missing web application folder
• href="../includes/style.css" gives www.acmewebapps.com/myapp/includes/style.css Correct

This would work, but we have to always remember to add the correct number of ".." entries to the path.  Which means that we can't use server side include of standard 'boiler-plate' includes, such as menu.jsp, because the paths will change depending on where the server side include is used.

The way to do client side includes in a way that works anywhere is to explicitly refer to the web application context root in your server side generation of the include, as follows:

<%=request.getContextPath()%>

So that the full include for the style.css example looks like:

href="<%=request.getContextPath()%>/includes/style.css"

To recap - for server side includes, just start with a slash and use the relative path in your web app.  For client side includes add "<%=request.getContextPath()%>/" and then use the relative path in your web app. This will allow your web app to be redeployed to any folder.

Outbound mail, SMTP Port 25, Blocked

It seems that some ISPs (Internet Service Providers) such as Wanadoo and AOL, are blocking port 25 traffic to all but their own smtp servers, in an attempt to combat spam.  The idea is that viruses on infected customers computers connect to open smtp servers on port 25 and mail out junk.  This seems like a rather clunky way for an ISP to try to deal with spam, they are effectively cutting out part of their support for TCP/IP - the connection they are supposed to provide.

Spam mail is huge problem, with current spam filters struggling to avoid marking legitimate email as junk - known as false positives in the industry. This means that real email is constantly ending up in peoples junk folders. So at least the ISPs are trying to help.

Our heavyweight mail service Tonsho, which allows sending of large email attachments and special spam filtering, is affected by this port blocking. We need users to be able to connect to our smtp server. Therefore we have also made the Tonsho smtp server available on port 26.

Our spam protection system is based on authenticating users, and only accepting mail from authenticated users.  In the first instance we distinguish between automated emailers and genuine humans by means of a captcha.

We maintain a list of allowed contacts.  If a user who is not in your allowed contacts list send you an emails, they are automatically sent a challenge mail which links to a captcha. Once users have solved the captcha and been added to your allowed contacts, mails come straight through. Meaning they only have to authenticate once.

If you want to try Tonsho for yourself, for free, you can sign up here.

Announcing Tonsho.com

On Monday 4th February we will officially launch the beta of Tonsho - an email service that solves two of the biggest problems with email: sending large file attachments and spam.

With Tonsho you can send large email attachments as normal using our outgoing smtp mail server. The server strips off your attachment, puts it on a web sever and sends your recipient a link.

Our Spam filtering works by authenticating senders.  When someone not in your contacts tries to reach you they are sent a challenge email. This contains a link to a captcha - one of those squiggly things. Once solved the sender is always allowed to send to you; meaning you don't miss important mails from your customers and friends.

Naturally I'm excited about launching Tonsho. The file sending stems from an idea I had when discussing sending files with Dan Maxwell in the lake district. Creating a working prototype was fairly straight forward. Deciding to go ahead with the idea was the most difficult part. Creating a full blown service was very involved - things like how to describe and present the service, creating help pages and getting the user options correct all take a lot of time and effort.

At first we'll quietly announce the service so that we can be fast to respond to questions and fix any teething problems. Then start to really market it once we're confident its really robust.

Please do sign up for a free beta account here!