RSS Feeds or Web Feeds

We just announced our official release of our RSS Reader and a hot debate inside the company for weeks has been what to name the reader. We finally settled on the label "RSS Feeds". There were many other suggestions including "Web Feeds", "RSS Subscriptions", "My Feeds", and "My Subscriptions". I think we made a good decision but David Coursey of eWeek.com seems to disagree. Although David was not talking about our product, it was rather ironic that his article came out the same day we released our reader. I really like "RSS Feeds" because it can't be confused with any other technology. If you have heard of RSS you will "get it" right away. And if you haven't heard of RSS hopefully curiosity alone will inspire you to click on our help section and learn all about it. I'd like to hear other opinions though, so feel free to email me or leave comments!

Hackathon 1.0

I really enjoyed our first Hackathon and I want to thank everyone who participated. We accomplished a lot and the day was a big success, but the reason it was a lot of fun is because of the great people we have working for us.

Our morning breakfast started with everyone laughing at Steve for walking in like a zombie, laughing at me because of my great math skills ( 35/6 = 4 ? ), laughing at Jing for his wonderful attire, and laughing at Manny's story about his first car "tune-up" that resulted in the car catching fire.

After all the hard work, each team had to present their work to the group. The presentation were great, but also non-stop funny. Ellen cracked on Jing's shirt (again), Wenjie called Huey out for being nervous, and Huey inadvertently pulled up an email from me that show my "un-happiness", and of course Steve's love affair with Mike is a great bit of comedy.

I've worked in environments where there is a lot of hostility between co-workers. I'm glad everyone on our team gets along so well, it really makes working 10 hours on a Saturday enjoyable. I can't wait to see everyone at Hackathon 2.0!

Free Stuff

Today we released lots of free goodies! First, we officially launched Webmail Lite. And second, we launched the free code section of our website. Below is a short blurb about the code that we released, see the documentation of each utility for a full description.

MAILBOMB SMTPD POLICY DAEMON FOR POSTFIX
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This program is a Policy Daemon for Postfix MTAs version 2.1 or later. It's purpose is to identify unacceptable volumes of mail from various sources, and take action to prevent that mail from being delivered. The most common use is to limit the rate of mail that local users are allowed to send. This is especially useful to companies who provide email hosting services to a large userbase and who need to catch spammers who are abusing their system, BEFORE the unacceptable use can damage the provider's reputation.

cleanq
------
This utilty searches for mail in the Postfix mail queue who's first mailq output line matches the specified pattern. The script will remove all matching emails from the mail queue, moving them to a folder - either a subdirectory of the Postfix mail queue directory called "cleanq/PATTERN" or DIRECTORY_NAME depending upon if DIRECTORY_NAME was passed to this script as the second parameter.

The most useful way to use this utility is to pass the sender's email address or domain name as the only parameter.

mq
---
This utilty displays the contents of the Postfix mail queue, outputting the details for each message on a sigle line.

qv
--
This utilty displays an email that is in the Postfix mail queue, coresponding to QUEUEID.

qvmv
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This utilty deletes an email that is in the Postfix mail queue, coresponding to QUEUEID.

showdb
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This utilty displays the contents of a DB_File.

Email Auto-Config
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This is the source code for a program that will automatically configure a user’s Webmail.us-hosted email account in Outlook, Netscape Mail, Thunderbird, or Eudora. It can configure a new account or adjust the configuration settings for an existing account. The Email Auto-Config tool is only for Secure POP3 accounts.

Code Reviews

Today we did code reviews on two projects codenamed "Louie" and "CD". These projects will be released in a few months but the code reviews were a big success. Code reviews are a critical part of the development process for the following reasons:

1. Everyone that participates learns something they didn't know before the review.
2. Future code is made better because we learn from our current mistakes.
3. Current code that has issues gets fixed immediately.
4. Developers work hard before a review to make sure code is commented and standards are followed.
5. Bugs are identified before the product goes to testing, saving time in the long term.

My favorite part of the review today was when Wenjie and Mike stood at the whiteboard writing out pseudo code and arguing whether each other's algorithm would work. You wouldn't know it by looking at them but these two guys are pretty strong-willed when it comes to code. I enjoyed watching them trying to explain their logic to each other, you could really see two great minds at work, it was quite the site to see and I can't wait for Wenjie to get his shot at Mike's code at our next review. :)

Webmail Lite

We are launching a new free beta application called "Webmail Lite". Webmail Lite is designed to provide business users anytime access to their email via our Webmail interface. Anyone with a POP or IMAP server can use our Webmail to view their email. We do not remove the mail from the remote servers, so don't worry about losing anything.

There are many awesome features in this application:
1. FREE
2. FREE RSS Reader
3. One-click access to all your email accounts including Gmail, Yahoo, etc.
4. Address Book entries span all your accounts.
5. Account Options span all your accounts.
6. IMAP and POP Support
7. SSL Support

Why is it called "Lite"? The application is simply an interface and since we don't host the email we cannot provide many of our superb hosted features. For instance we do not offer spam or virus protection (we leave that up to your current hosting provider), ability to filter emails to folders, the ability to have folders, mail forwarding, vacation messages, and many other features that current Webmail.us customers get with our paid service.

Please keep in mind this product is in beta right now and we would appreciate any feedback. Just sign up for a free profile and fill out the feedback form.

A note for all you gmail users, you have to enable pop in your account options before you can access gmail via our system. Yahoo users have to pay the $20 or whatever it is now for POP access.

The perfect user in my mind for this application is the small business user who runs their own POP/IMAP server but lacks a good Webmail interface. The user may use Outlook when in the office, but may lack access to their email when on the road, in a coffee shop, or even at home. Our application will give these types of users anywhere access to their email.

I'm sure there are also many people who do have Webmail access but hate the interface and speed of their current solution. I hope this application will be a lifesaver for all you who are in this situation.

"Checking My Email"

My daughter (who is three) saw me typing at my computer tonight and asked me clear as day "Daddy, what are you doing? .... Checking your email?" LOL. I about died laughing, she picks up on everything and I'm always saying "I have to check my email." She's so smart. :)

RSS Reader

We just released our final internal beta of our Webmail w/ an integrated RSS reader. We will soon be releasing it to the public, but I thought I would give a little sneak preview for all my fans..err...those people who accidentally stumble upon my blog. Although we have never offically annouced this release, thewhir.com annouced the news a bit early last month.

But here are a few features of our reader that I love...

1. It's very tightly integrated within Webmail, meaning I don't have to have two applications open all day.
2. I love Sharpreader, but I hated not being able to access my reader from home, and having the reader at home and work was just too much trouble to maintain.
3. The subscription process is very simple and fast.
4. You can access your feeds just like any other IMAP folder, meaning your RSS is available via Outlook, Thunderbird, or any other IMAP client.
5. We have a "Send to Inbox" option that will allow our POP users to enjoy our RSS reader too.
6. Administrator Options. We allow admins to turn RSS on/off per domain, and we allow them to auto-subscribe their users to a feed.

More than anything, I love how simple it will be for people who don't "get" RSS yet to use it, maybe without even knowing.

Faces & Places: Not Mitnick!

I'm not sure why I remembered this today, but in early 2004 I was interviewed by a reporter about the odd fact that the spelling of my name is so similar to Kevin Mitnick's name. I tried digging around on Google for the original post and the reporter's name but I could only find one link, and it was not the original. I'm going to republish the article below so that I won't lose it. I am especially fond of it because of the "baby-face" quote. :)

By the way, the twice a year rule is still in effect...

Faces & Places: Not Mitnick!
Sure, people do a double take when introduced to Kevin Minnick, the new VP of product development for managed security and e-mail hosting provider Excedent Technologies. That's what happens when your name is one letter off from one of the world's most notorious hackers.

"Ever since Kevin Mitnick started making headlines nine years ago, I am often asked about the close spelling of our names. This usually occurs about twice a year, but I have never seriously been mistaken for him," says the blond, baby-faced Minnick. "More than anything, my CEO gives me a hard time, but I know deep down he's glad that I'm on his side and not the other."

While Minnick, a former Honeywell software developer, works this year on improving Excedent's project delivery times and expanding specialty teams, the other Kevin -- the one who was eventually captured and imprisoned in the 1990s for computer-based crimes -- is also plying his skills on the legitimate side of the street. He's the founder of the consultancy Defensive Thinking and reportedly is working on a new book about real-life attacks, tentatively titled The Art of Intrusion.

Wanted: C++ Programmer

We are still hiring, and I'm especially interested in those of you who have experience programming in Visual Studio. Why? We want to further our integration with Outlook, Thunderbird, and other desktop clients....I'll leave it at that, stay tuned.

NCTC Software Alliance

I will be on a panel at the Software Alliance meeting this Friday (6/24). The event is going to be held at the Sigma Grill at 4:00pm. I will be discussing my "favorite development methodology." To attend, I think you just need to register.

Inbox Event

I went to the Inbox conference last week and had a really good time. This is the second time I have been to this event and both times I have had great experiences. I like hearing what the experts have to say about the challenges facing our industry. I also enjoy meeting our competitors and getting their views. It makes me feel extremely good about where we are as a company and the great opportunity that we have in front of us.

Overall I felt the conference was much smaller than last year, which is disappointing, but it's great to have an event that is focused on email.

Kevin

My daughter's laptop

Several months ago my wife and I taught Jordan (our 3 year old) the concept of IMing. We both have laptops and we put them next to each other so Jordan could see how IMing worked. She typed on one computer and knew to look on the other computer to see the result (turning on the sound helped). She was rather fascinated for around 30 seconds, I guess since she can't read yet she didn't quite understand the beauty.

The point is that email, IM, and computers in general are going to come very naturally to kids growing up these days. Jordan already knows how to move the mouse, type in Word, and turn off the computer. She also understands where CDs and DVDs go in a laptop. Her favorite thing to do with my laptop though is close the cover so that I will get the hint that it is time to play, LOL.

I'm sure when she's going off to college my current laptop won't get the job done, but it makes me wonder what will laptops look like 15 years from now. My guess is that there won't be battery cables, no network cables, and my biggest prediction of all...no operating system! The computer will simply boot up from the internet....sorry Microsoft. I'm sure we are a lot closer to Internet booting than 15 years, probably more like 5 years.

Scheduled Downtime

I saw this when logging into blogger today:

*******************************************
A Bit More Scheduled Downtime
Sorry folks, we've got to bring Blogger down again at 2pm PST today, for a bit more network maintenance. It should be back up by 2:45pm. – Eric [5/13/2005 10:09:00 AM]

Scheduled Downtime
We will have 1 hour of scheduled downtime on Tuesday, May 10th at 4pm (Pacific Time), to do some database maintenance. – Eric [5/9/2005 05:11:00 PM]
*******************************************

Boy oh Boy, our customer support team would kill me if I tried to do maintenance at those times...even if it was announced 4 hours ahead of time, LOL.

Virginia Tech Commencement 2005

This Friday Virginia Tech is holding its 133rd commencement ceremony. I'm excited to say that we are hiring 3 graduating members of this class. I hope they realize the great achievement they have accomplished. I graduated from Virginia Tech back in May of 2000. I'll never forget staying up all night coding (we started this business about a semester before graduation) the night before graduation. I slept for about an hour and then headed over to the graduation ceremony. I remember seeing pictures of myself looking like I had been out all night partying, pretty funny how things change but are still the same. Myself and some members of our team have put in some long nights this past weekend, it's pretty amazing how much you can accomplish at night, it's so much easier to focus without the buzz of the office during the day.

For this year's graduating class I have one piece of advice: Don't be afraid to take chances!

And for you lucky three that are joining our team... You have made an excellent decision, now make the most it!

Google For It

I was watching the show "Numb3rs" late Friday night, which I enjoy for it's mathematical background, although the show is somewhat unrealistic, it touched upon three of my favorite topics. Google, Money Ball, and baseball.

In this episode the math nerd used the phrase "I Googled for ..." which struck me as fascinating that this phrase is now so mainstream. It was expected that everyone watching this show knows what the phrase means, which really shows how much power Google has in the search world.

The show also talked about the book "Money Ball" which is one of my favorite books. The show discussed using saber metrics to predict if someone would be a criminal based on where they lived, how much money they had growing up, etc. Mony Ball discusses how the Oakland A's use math to compete with much larger teams like the Yankees, interesting use of math in both cases.

Testing

I know I haven't posted anything in awhile, but it's not entirely my fault, blogger had a bug last week that prevented me from saving a post I spent a solid 15 minutes composing. I've long since forgotten what it was about, but it just goes to prove you can never have enough testing. Improved testing is another big goal for my team in 2005. Webmail 3.1 has been our most successful release to date from a QA standpoint and is a direct result of the large increase in number of hours spent testing.

Gmail pop server

On a technical note, it might be of some interest to those techies out there that gmail's pop server is not completely following the RFC. From some testing it appears that gmail's pop server will only "list" messages once; after they are retrieved they are removed from the list never to be seen again. This is interesting for a number of reasons, but for email clients the "leave copy on server" functionality almost has no useful purpose.

Also, when you issue a "dele" (delete) command, gmail seems to ignore this command altogether. It says "+OK marked for deletion", but from my testing the message is not deleted.

Not sure if this is a bug, or intended, I couldn't find any mention of it on gmail's site though. Let me know if you can find anything.

Driven

Yesterday I spent 3 hours of my day interviewing three potential candidates (all for different positions) within our company. I'm not sure if it was partly due to my cold or not, but it was one of the most tiring days I have experienced in awhile. Granted I was at the office for 12 hours and skipped dinner, but the last time I remember feeling that drained after a day of work was 13 months ago when we were doing some major overhauls to our system infrastructure and I was up for 30 hours straight. I really enjoyed each interview, but the "drained" feeling definitely reminded me of the early days back in 1999 and 2000. Back then we would all pull 15-18 hour days for months on end and not think twice about it, our small team had an amazing drive. All of us were driven by something inside to make a great company and we all worked really hard. As I interview candidate after candidate I try to spot that "drive", these interviews would go so much faster if I could spot the "driven" quality quicker. Unfortunately not many people have it, fortunately I am surrounded by people who do have "it", and I will continue to push myself to not settle for anything less.

Blogs Make You Smarter

I've been amazed over the last year how much I learn on a daily basis because of blogs and RSS. Information is poured into my RSS reader and it's so easy to browse the topics and read the interesting items. As another example, a co-worker today told me that they clicked over to David Catalano's blog from my blog and posted a comment; David saw the comment and emailed the co-worker and asked if they would like to borrow the book. Now the co-worker is going to read the book. Not only did they learn something from the blog, but now they are going to read a great book!

Ten years ago I was similarly amazed by how much smarter the Internet was making people. Every morning you could quickly browse your favorite news sites quickly and easily. People could email you information instantly, newsgroups always had great information based on topic, and I haven't even mentioned Google yet. I believe blogs and RSS have taken the power of the Internet to the next level and most "normal" people still have no clue what blogging and RSS is all about; so it will only get more useful as the masses understand and adapt the technology.

We were discussing today creative ways to find more potential developers for our team. Being in SWVA we have to be creative to find great people, and the idea of searching blogs for candidates came up for discussion. I think it would be a great idea for Monster to buy a blogging company. If all resumes came with a link to their blog it would provide so much more value than a bland old resume. If I get a stack of 50 resumes they all start looking alike around resume 17, but the one or two that have links to their blog always stand out in my memory.

Time Tracking

One of my big goals for 2005 was better tracking of where my team spent their valuable hours. We just implemented our third method for time tracking this year, but this time I think we've found the winner. It's a simple online program, but it easy to enter the time and it provides great reports. Maybe next month I'll find something better and make my team switch again (good thing they love me). The report I just ran on my time was the total hours that I have worked so far in March, it totaled up to 212 so far, or just about 55 hours a week.

Now to most of my friends this sounds like a lot, but to me it's not that bad. I enjoy working late into the night at home, and many aspects of my job even require me to do some things late at night. Weekend hours are great for research because I don't get distracted by the hustle and bustle of a normal weekday. It's great to have the flexibility to work from home and makes working a lot of hours possible. This flexibility is something we extend to all of our developers, every member of my team can work from home and most do, all for different reasons.