Inbox Buddy 1.0 Now Available !!!!!

Well ... We're no longer virgins anymore.  We just released the Inbox Buddy 1.0 (about 22 odd minutes ago), wrote the press release (about 6 minutes ago), updated the site and are now at the "Must Blog" stage.  You might want to take a look at it if you're an Outlook 2000 / XP user [ Go ].  Every person who's tried it that I've spoken to has said very, very positive things about it and that makes us tremendously happy. 

As it has been said "It takes a village" and I'd also like to thank some of the folks who did such a good job of pushing and prodding us into making Inbox Buddy better:

• Kjartan who pushed us heavily on improving our Exchange Server support (it now works Dude!)
• Buzz who campaigned heavily for automatic routing to a spam folder and was the deciding voice that got that feature added as a standard default
• Matt who generally all around just did a wonderful job of overall pushing us
• Elaine who's been tireless in reporting spam
• John who said such sweet, sweet words about us and also identified the issues with respect to installing views in server side PST files (fixed !!!!)
• Tommy who found and helped us troubleshoot problems when Outlook as Word as the default editor (fixed !!!)
• Jim Armstrong who gave us valuable tips on how to handle time outs for our next beta version release

And there are many, many others.  If I left you off the list then I totally apologize.  Thanks to you as well. 

Night all...

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Today I'm Heads Down

Today is pretty heads down w/o no to low blogging.  Between getting the Inbox Buddy 1.0 done (it's tested but we're having a tiny Install issue) and some personal issues, I'm swamped.  As of tomorrow the Inbox Buddy 1.0 will be available for download and then sometime in the next 30 days you'll even be able to pay us for it.  I know, I know, build the the payment infrastructure first, do a lot of marketing.  Sorry ... I was a dot commer.  I've seen what being greedy does.  Our first priority with Inbox Buddy is making an outstanding product.  If we do that well then we'll make money even if people have to mail us checks.  If we don't do that then having credit card processing won't do much for us, will it?  My first rule of marketing is always "Make a Good if not Great Product".

Oh and if you're interested in the many issues surrounding Spam then here's a good article that Buzz at ActiveWords sent me. 

One-third of the 30 billion e-mails sent worldwide each day are spam. That's 10 billion daily pitches for herbal Viagra, Nigerian scams, and genital-enlarging creams piling up in our inboxes. Neither legislation nor litigation against spammers has stemmed the tide, and they're not going to have much of an effect in the future, either. It's time to give up: Despite the best efforts of legislators, lawyers, and computer programmers, spam has won. Spam is killing e-mail.

Or at least it's about to destroy the e-mail we're used to: the tool that lets a stranger respond to something you posted on your Web site or that lets a potential client contact you after reading an article you wrote. E-mail is pervasive because it's simple to use, remarkably flexible, and it reaches everyone. The trouble is that e-mail is too good at that third task. Because e-mail inboxes are open to anyone, longtime Internet users now receive hundreds of spams per day, making e-mail virtually unusable without countermeasures. [ Go ]

Kevin Werbach has some really good points in this article.  I don't agree with all of them but it's an excellent article.  Our Inbox Buddy product uses a number of the approaches in this article including by Black and White lists as well as a lot of techniques that he doesn't mention.  Here's a reference to some comments on his blog about this article.  [ Go ]

7:04:39 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This