Spaming with my address

Oh how I hate spam..

Most of us live with spam as an annoyance, today however spam might have cost me some real money.

Today I got some responses to spam that was sent with my companies address as the return address.

My best guess is that the spamming applications spider the internet like search engines and collect email address.  Not just email address to send to but also email address to send from..

It is very easy to send an email and have the return address what ever you wish.

I could for instance set my "reply to" address to dave@micorsoft.com or for that matter georgebush@whitehouse.com  What ever I want.. Of course I wouldn't do that because it would mean I wouldn't get any responses to my emails.. But in the case of spam they don't want responses.. They want you to go to the website included in the email. 

 

What does this respond to my address mean? It means that every one who received an email from my company that didn't originate from my company will now be put off.  If it continues they might even block all emails coming from my companies address.  Worst case they might remember the company name and be totally put off by what they think is my company policy.

 

What do I do though?  Well for now I'll hope it's a one time thing. (very wishful) I'll do a deep scan for virus and then I'll check out my options.  Here's hoping I can track down the people who are spoofing my address (and kill them) and threaten/actually sue them.   

Contacts

Today we released Contacts 1.0 a program that came about in funny way.

 

One Line Apps believes we should in some ways prove we can do for you what you're looking for as a client.  The problem is to accomplish this we do a little bit of development for free.  Until we have a much bigger portfolio we have to go this rout.  Unfortunately sometimes it comes up and bites us in the..  Well it bites us.

Recently we started writing a program for a small <product type here> supply company.  We conferred and came up with sketches of an application.  Based on their data the way they work and what they thought they wanted OLA started writing software. Just an initial skeleton of the application. Something to allow them to get the feel of the eventual product.  If they liked it we would fill in the functionality one form at a time.  It's just how we roll. You like we move on-- You don't like we revise.

After we finished a rough of the application we handed the client a copy of the app and our contract.  No surprises in that contract it was exactly the price we discussed on the phone.  Well that's not quite true the contract might have been surprisingly detailed.  In the software world sometimes a person can say their paying for something but the developer thinks they're getting paid for something else.  It's often called scope creep.  To prevent that contracts need to be solid.

Ok so client has skeleton app and contract, and then they vaporized.  The deadline for signing the contract passed. Phone calls were dodged. Emails went unanswered. They were gone.  We had spent hours in meetings and even more building the initial app. Heck even the contract creation took time.  All for not.  We asked why and received the standard "I'm too busy right now to help with the development" and then the "Money is kind of tight right now perhaps later."

BTW the application would have resulted in about a 300% increase in employee productivity by centralizing their inventory information. It would mean they could get more out of their employees given themselves more time and ultimately more money. 

Ok so now we have 20hours paid to our coders and not a penny for it. What to do??

We turned lemons into gold. Spent another 20 hours and created Contacts 1.0.  See the client had some amazing ideas for tracking interactions between them and their clients. That coupled with some of our in-house procedures and an app was conceived and born.  The application was launched today at a great price. We're hoping for volume as the app should appeal to a wide range of businesses.

I guess the lesson here is that before we start one lick of code we should have a starter contract. That and that when a client vaporizes when they see a contract, the work you've done might as well go into another project.

PS.  You can get this software on my site. It's quite interesting and I'm sure we as a company will start using it.