Brave Tech World

February 23, 2007

FRI 23 FEB 2007

When a user misspell his email address By Marcelo

 

    All notifications emails coming out of a Sampa registration process use the "sampa" alias. So if somebody uses a bad email address like "DontExist @yahoo.com" and it bounces, it goes directly into my inbox.

 

    We always had our share of bad emails. Usually 5-10% of people that signup for Sampa use a bad email address. But on the last 4 weeks or so, the number had grown to 10-15% per day of bad email addresses.

 

    I always keep an close eye on it because we had problems with AOL and Rediff blocking all our emails (they thought we were a spam server).

 

    So I went to do a close analysis of one week of bad emails.

 

    Some surprises, some not. We had 4 categories of mistakes:

1. People using fake email address, like "fake @fake.com" or "test @test.com"
2. People misspelling the domain, like "joe @ yhoo.com"
3. People misspelling their alias, like "jeo @ yahoo.com" (intended joe @yahoo.com)
4. People using a Sampa address, like "joe @sampa.com" or "joe @sampasite.com".

     For #1, there is not much we can do except clarify that the email must exist. So we changed our language on the website. Before it said you must enter a "valid email address", now it says "an existing email address".

 

    For #2, we do a DNS lookup now for every email address. If the guy types xyz@yhoo.com we will flag it, unless, of course, the domain was registered by somebody (at that happens a lot for misspellings of Yahoo, Hotmail, GMail, AOL, etc.)

 

    For #3, there is not much we can do. Yahoo never tells if an email exists during an SMTP session. Nor does AOL. Hotmail does tell you that. Don't know about GMail. Doing that test is hard because I need to find out the MX record for that domain, then do a "special" SMTP conversation to figure it out. It is quite a bit of code and I don't have the time now.

 

    For #4, we just flat out prohibit the use of our own domains, like "@sampa.com", "@sampasite.com", "@brainuse.com", "@inthesphere.com", etc. That is a problem because we cannot use our own work emails to sign up for Sampa (but we have an easy workaround).

 

     What have the results been? We don't know yet because I only have two days of data. I want to compare a full week to see the number of people that registered end up confirming their addresses or not.

 

 

 

 

 

FRI 23 FEB 2007

Google bends the rules for its own Ads By Marcelo

 

    There are a lot of sites on the Internet running Google Adsense, you know, the Google Ads that appear on sites that are not from Google.

 

    Google always has a message on those ads saying "Ads by Google".  If you go to my previous blog post (When a user misspell his email address) on the top Google Ad you'll see "Ads by Gooooooogle".

 

    Today I went to LinkedIn and I was looking for somebody when I saw an ad for Google's GMail. The first thing I noticed was the ad was a video. Never seen that before. Then I realized it was an Ad for GMail (it was not clear).

 

     This is a screenshot of a regular Text Ad on LinkedIn:

 

 

    Notice that it clear starts with "Ads by Google".

 

    Here is another Ad from Google, but this time an Image:

 

 

    Not as clear as before, but the "Ads by Google" disclaimer is there at the bottom (it would be better to be consistent at the top of the ad)

 

    Finally, here is a Google video ad for GMail:

 

 

 

    Nope, it doesn't say it is an Ad.

 

    When I worked on MSN Search, there was an FCC probe into search engines and their paid-links (a.k.a. sponsored links) practices in the sense of not misleading users into clicking on ads without them knowing it was ads.

 

    Afraid of some FCC regulation, the big search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and AOL) decided to clearly label the Ads links. Most of them already did that, but reinforcing it helped the FCC leave us alone.

 

    Now, Google sometimes does things that either are evil or stupid. Since they claim to "do no evil", this is an obvious case of a stupid decision on not disclaiming on their on Google Adsense program that this video is an ad.

 

    What you think?

 

 

 

 

FRI 23 FEB 2007

My favorite browser extensions By Marcelo

 

    I just thought it would be interesting to list what I've been using on my browser. I'm very careful with not installing too much stuff because it can slow down the perf, but these are the tools that I can't live without:

 

On Internet Explorer:

 

• Alexa Toolbar: I just love to know the rank of sites that I visit.
• Compete Toolbar: Just like Alexa, but they give me a 1-click to my own sites information and they have this "Trust" level for sites (a bit of anti-phishing help)
• Fiddler: A neat HTTP tracer. This is for developers only.
• DevToolbar: An easy way to check and manipulate your page's HTML. (for web developers only)

 

On Firefox I use:

 

• Compete Toolbar: Same as IE's compete (I wish there was Alexa for FF)
• MeasureIt: An extension that let's me measure the distance between two pixels.
• Web Developer: This is a must have tool for any... well... web developer! Like the DevToolbar for IE, it let's you see and do a lot of interesting things with your HTML.
• Console 2: A great extension to filter JavaScript errors.

 

    Any other tool/extension that I should be using?