CogBlog

Thirty-four years ago, in October 1971 an engineer named Ray Tomlinson used an @ symbol when he created the first network email.

Yahoo Search Marketing eliminated what never should have been implemented -- the $20 monthly minimum spend on inactive or low spend pay-per-click accounts.

Personally, I think they should have never instituted that kind of a policy in the first place. It is just the kind of thing that will really irk customers while also providing very little benefit to Yahoo.

Still the most customer unfriendly system is the Looksmart/Ask Jeeves plan where you specify your monthly budget and they charge your card for the full month immediately. Your card will be charged again to bring you back up to the monthly balance no matter what your spend was. For instance, if your monthly budget was $500, and they delivered only $50 in clicks, you'll be charged another $50 at the end of the month. They essentially force you to loan them a full month's budget as long as your account is open.

I'll be honest. They're good. Real good.

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/051020/earns_google.html?.v=3

Now is about the time the destructive arrogance sets in.

I'm all for the paperless office, and I can understand the economic advantage to a software provide of routing support requests through their website rather than the phone. But, sometimes you actually need to speak to someone.

I've had a problem with a web analytics vendor of ours since Friday. It is a minor problem I'm sure, and one that a knowledgeable technician could fix in seconds. But, it completely prevents me from working with the account.

When you go to the support section of their site you are invited to create an email support ticket, which I did Friday morning. I had planned to work with this account on Friday, but they reassured me that they respond within 24 hours. They don't. And, when they did respond (this morning) the message was "It sounds like you are right about the fix, and I see that you were able to access the account". I wasn't able to access the account.

So now, when I go to call them their number is nowhere to be found. There is literally not one phone number on their site. I had to do a Google local search just to find their office number in a directory.

The sad part is, that I've been an evangelist for this company. I'm not even saying who it is now, because I'm hoping they come through before my opinion is completely soured.

Support after the sale is one of the most important considerations for a business software or software services buyer. Giving me no option but slow email is not support.

About once a week now I get a message from a bank warning that my account settings need to be updated, or that my security has been compromised somehow. All I need to do is go log in, and set things straight. How helpful.

Only problem is that I usually don't have an account at the bank in question.

It is really some guy in Romania who would just love to get his hands on my username and password. The name for this kind of scam is one of those words that everyone loves to say right now: pfishing.

Anyway, I've been impressed with the improvements in design quality lately. These messages used to be easy to spot:

"hello, if you plaese enter password at site here. Custom Service".

Uh, no.

But now they will often use the bank's own template for the email, even leaving the links to the images hosted by the bank. It all looks very legit. Here is one I received today:



Look, they are letting me know that someone from Eastern Europe is trying to steal my money. The IRONY!

This doesn't look bad. They might investigate the US convention for typing dates though. And, their call to action needs some work. "perform the steps necessary"?

So, what happens if you click that link? You go to...WOW, they are going for a homerun here. They want my whole life!



Oooh, that one is really going to hurt. Drivers license, Mother's maiden name, PIN number??

I fear for my GrandMother every time I see one of these messages.

Here is an article I wrote for Connect Magazine recently about the interesting Eye Tools/Enquiro Eye Tracking Study:

http://www.connect-utah.com/article.asp?r=1250&iid=37&sid=1

If you've ever watched The Apprentice you are familiar with the format: Two teams compete with each other to complete a task that does a lot more to feature a sponsor brand, than actually tell you much about the participants executive skills.

I keep watching even though I always feel that I've just watched a one-hour advertisement for the sponsor of the night. Well, apparently the show has paid off big time for some of the products featured on the show.

A highlight:

Pontiac had a 10-day goal to sell 1,000 cars (the Solstice) within 10 days of the show. They sold 1,000 cars within 41 minutes of the east coast airing. They eventually pre-sold their entire year's production before anyone had actually seen a model in person.

Here is an article on ClickZ that describes the results. There are some interesting details on Yahoo!'s involvement. Worth a read.

I've notice that a lot of our clients, and our contact forms on COGBOX.com have been targets of spammers lately. They are trying to use client contact forms to anonymously send email from our servers.

The process is to insert MIME mail headers into your message body in a contact form. If the script behind the form is not careful it can easily create an autoreply message that looks like it should be going out to the spammers list instead of to you or the person submitting the form. Or, they could even be trying to infect your mail server with a nasty virus. Basically, they hijack your contact forms for their own devious purposes.

Usually the form address is a random string of numbers and letters such as Xnmszgza@cogbox.com. The spammer will run through each field of your form trying to find one that will just pass through their alternate headers unchanged.

So, if you notice a lot of strange messages from odd email addresses lately, and if you are getting angry messages from people saying "why have you sent me this email for cheap viagra" you may have a problem.