DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL.This mailbox is not monitored and you will not receive a response.

Every email I receive these days seems to contain that sentence in one form or other. A bit rude, isn’t it? Wait, it gets better…

To ensure delivery, please add us to your address book.

Let me get this straight — you want me to add you to my address book, but you won’t even read my emails? Instead you’re going to make me take a 20 minute scavenger hunt around your website to find out how to get in touch with you?

Why?

I’d rather just hit reply.

Here’s an idea: Why not start listening to your customers instead of insisting on having a one-way conversation all the time?

It’s easy:
• Set up a filter to delete all the “Out of Office” emails and the delayed delivery notices.
• Forward the bounced emails to your email management script to remove them from your mailing list.
• Actually start reading and responding to what your users/customers have to say.

Let’s start a new trend and stop using that annoying “no-reply” email address. Come on — we can be more creative than that!

An introduction to using Gmail as your Email Service Provider

There are many reasons to consider outsourcing your email. Getting an email into someone’s inbox is not a simple matter these days. There are a million things you need to know to make sure an email actually makes it to the recipient and not into the junk folder. That’s why more and more people are opting to have an email service provider (ESP) take care of sending email for them. With an ESP, you let them keep up with all the blacklists and the whitelists. You can stop worrying about maintaining mail servers and start focusing on the real challenges of your business.

There are a few downsides to using an ESP. First, they are relatively expensive. For a good ESP, you are looking at paying thousands of dollars a year just to send a few emails. Secondly, most ESP’s are focused towards corporate bulk mailers instead of web startups that send lots of customized emails to one person at a time. This makes integration really awkward. Lastly, the ESP’s that have API’s don’t make it easy on you. It’s hard to find an ESP that will integrate nicely with your existing code.

Recently I decided to try using Google Apps for your Domain to send emails from our website. Google Apps offers many of the same benefits as an ESP, but they do it for free and code integration is a non-issue. So far, the results have been great and we’re not losing as many emails to spam filters anymore. I’m not an deliverability expert, but I learned a lot from fighting the email battle this past week. My goal with this tutorial is to share what I learned, so you don’t have to spend a week running all over the web to find it.

The step-by-step tutorial I wish I’d had a week ago:

Set up Google Apps for your domain
Google Apps for your domain comes in a free Standard Edition and a $50/user/year Premier Edition. I took advantage of their offer of one month free with the Premier Edition (mainly for their included tech support), but ultimately I decided that the Standard Edition more than meets my needs. Unless you’ve got some crazy integration needs, Standard Edition will probably do just fine.

Verify your domain
Verifying your domain allows GMail to send emails from your domain instead of on behalf of your domain. You can verify your domain name by either
uploading a specific HTML file to your site, or by adding a CNAME record to your DNS records.

Create an account for each email address you want to send from
Google makes it easy to set up multiple accounts with an Excel spreadsheet upload. I’d recommend using the same password for each account to simplify your life and code. If you’re like me, the first thing you will want to do is sign in to each account and forward everything to an email address that you check every day.

Add Google’s MX servers to your DNS records
You will need to add these MX records for Google’s mail servers to your DNS records

Publish an SPF record that includes Google’s SPF record.
A lot of spam filters rely on the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Sender ID to decide whether or not to allow your message through or not. An SPF record is simply a DNS record on your server that has a list of IP addresses and domain names that are allowed to send emails from your domain name. In addition to listing the IP addresses of your own servers, you can also include the SPF record from another domain. In this case, we want to include Google’s SPF record to include an up to date list of their mail servers. If you are going to be sending mail from other servers besides google, I recommend you look over this list of common mistakes before you start playing around with your SPF record. You should be particularly careful if you have existing servers that are sending out mail. It’s easy to lock them out with a bad SPF record.

Use a hard fail (for Hotmail’s behalf)
Your SPF record should end with either “~all” or “-all”. The “~all” is a soft fail. This means that servers not listed in your SPF record should be given extra scrutiny. The “-all” is a hard fail. This means that any server that tries to send an email from your domain that is not included on your SPF record will be rejected. Google recommends you use a soft fail (~all) to ensure deliverability, but in practice I found that specifying a hard fail was the only way to get an email into a Hotmail inbox. The hard fail communicates your confidence that your email system is secure. Most spam filters like that.

Submit your SPF record to Hotmail
You need to submit your SPF record to Hotmail to be included in their Sender ID program. Please note that Hotmail caches their records daily. This means if you change something you will need to resubmit your record in order to have your changes take effect immediately.

Subscribe to feedback loops
Feedback loops provide a way for ISP’s to let email senders know when people are clicking the “report spam” button. Google actively subscribes to these feedback loops so they can stop people from sending spam from their mail servers. Google allows you to be informed about these complaints as well. This allows you to quickly remove the complainers from your mailing list. You can get a copy of these complaints by creating email lists for abuse@yourdomain.com and postmaster@yourdomain.com

Make sure you include a return-path in your email header
Sender ID checks are performed against the purported responsible address (PRA). SPF checks are performed against the return-path (or bounce address). This means you need to make sure you are sending the correct return-path in your email header and not something generic like “noreply@localhost”.

Make sure you are sending quality emails
There are a lot of things you can do to the emails themselves to increase your chances of getting past spam filters. There are a couple “no-brainers”, like making sure you include an unsubscribe link and use valid HTML. There are also a few not-so-obvious things you can do like adding your physical mailing address to the footer of each email. It’s worth taking some time to research what spam filters care about so you can modify your emails accordingly.

Additional Resources:
Official site for Sender Policy Framework
Learn more about Sender ID from Microsoft
Microsoft’s wizard for creating Sender ID records
Information about the CAN-SPAM Act
Hotmail delivery tips for Sender ID and SPF
Whitepapers on deliverability from Return Path

Please chip in your thoughts / questions. Good luck!

This is a guest blog from my roommate, Mike Soltys. Mike and I graduated from Clemson together and now he’s working on his PHD at CU. Here are Mike’s thoughts on start-up life:

Hey Tech-blog world! My name is Mike and I’m a guest blogger for Josh. As many of you who read this blog may or may not know, my roommates are starting up the “startup” company “EventVue“. Now, you’ll have to forgive me for poor tech-terminology and the like because I’m by no means a techy, but I’m going to try to give you my outside view of the tech-startup world.

I’d first like to talk about the cost of starting up a company. I’m in college. I’ve been in college for just about as long as I can remember and I’ll be in college for quite some time. As a college student, I’m poor as dirt but Its OK because I really don’t work that hard. My roommates on the other hand don’t even know the meaning of “weekend” and they’re just as poor as me. They say that some day they will be millionaires, and when thats the case I guess all that hard work will pay off… but in the mean time is it really worth eating cold pop-tarts because you can’t afford a toaster (or the energy to run one?)

The second major qualm I have against being a start-up dude myself is the heavy use of Mac’s. I’m writing this very blog on a Mac and I’m hating every minute of it. Do Mac users think they are “above” right clicking, or was the right mouse button just too visually displeasing to include on their laptops?

The benefit of being a start-up dude is the party’s. I’ve been fortunate enough to be invited to a few tech party’s which are actually pretty classy (even though they usually do lack ladies). They usually feature good beer, good food and stimulating conversation about the latest website that I just have to go to.

I guess thats why they do it… the party’s, but honestly I think I’m happy with being the roommate of a techie and being invited to the occasional party without the hard work, low pay, and the stupid Macs. Well, until we meet again, take care tech world!
- Mike

Our product is far from finished. There are a million features that we want, but just don’t have yet. We’re working our butts off to get there, but in the meantime, we’re selling what we have.

I realized today that we’ve been spending more time telling our customers about the product we are building, than the product we have for sale right now. Imagine taking a customer into a showroom and showing them a shiny new Porsche and then trying to convince them to buy a Honda. Even though the Honda is 100 times better than the beat up Pinto they were driving, they are never going to be as excited as they could have been. The Honda is a great car, but it pales in the shadow of the Porsche. Having seen the Porsche, the customer will start focusing on all the things the Honda is lacking instead of the real benefits it provides.

What about you?

Are you apologizing to your customers that your Honda can’t go from 0-60 in 2.6 seconds OR are you selling them with the fact that the Honda is one of the most reliable cars on the market?

Are you apologizing to your customers that your web application doesn’t have many features yet OR are you selling them with the fact that your product is simple, easy to use and reliable?

Your customers’ perception of your product is largely impacted by how you communicate it to them. Make sure your customers are pumped about the Honda you are selling today, before you tell them you’re going to give them a Porsche tomorrow.

One of the coolest things about running your own company is the opportunity to choose the people with whom you work.

I am stoked to announce a new addition to the EventVue team. Today is Kevin Musselman’s first day as EventVue’s first employee. Kevin was pursuing a PhD in Computer Science at Clemson before we talked him into working for us instead. I’m confident that Kevin will add a lot to our company. He’s smart, motivated and really passionate about what we are doing.

It’s going to be fun having a good friend and a fellow tiger working alongside us. Welcome to Boulder Kevin!

I’ve always been amazed by the number of books that promise to teach you how to program in just a few days or weeks. I recently stumbled across a book at Amazon entitled: Sams Teach Yourself PHP in 10 Minutes. 10 minutes!!!

Why do we think it is possible to learn JAVA in the same time it takes to make a pot of coffee?

It has taken me years to learn how to program and I am still learning new things every day. Imagine if we applied this same thinking to other skills. I’ve never seen a book on how to learn to play the piano in 10 minutes. That’s because everyone knows that learning to play the piano takes countless hours and years of practice. No one should expect to become an expert overnight.

Why are people in such a rush?

Let’s stop spreading this lie that you can learn everything you need to know about programming just by reading a $20 book. You can’t. Sure, you might be able to gain a superficial familiarity, but not the deep understanding that is required to build a real application. Books like this are a great way to explore your interests. Just realize that by the time you finish the last page, you probably know just enough to be dangerous.

I’ve been looking forward to writing this post for a long time!

I’m happy to announce that we have closed our series A round of funding for EventVue. Our angelic investors include Brad Feld, David Cohen, Dave McClure, Wendy Lea and several other incredible people. It’s exciting to have such an amazing group of people join us as we revolutionize the conference industry.

To our investors: Thank you for believing in us. We promise won’t let you down.

When we first got accepted into TechStars, we planned on building an event registration system. Thankfully we had some awesome mentors who encouraged us to focus solely on social networking. They pointed out that there are plenty of other companies already in event registration and it would be really tough for us to compete with them. On the other hand, we had a decent chance of becoming the best in the world at providing online communities for conferences. We were a little hard-headed at first, but after Brad, David, Noah, Eric and Todd all gave us the same advice, we finally sat up and paid attention. We are really grateful to these guys because they saved us from wasting a lot of time this summer.

Later this summer, Eric Norlin began pushing us to start thinking more like conference organizers. He kept asking “How are you going to decrease my cost or increase my revenue?” This time we listened. In fact, we decided to address his question head on. Now our entire revenue model is an answer to that question: We only get paid when we are successful in driving more registrations to a conference.

I’m going to share a secret: Very little of EventVue was our idea. Instead we borrowed from the insight of dozens of conference organizers and mentors. That’s what entrepreneurship is all about.  It’s learning to listen to the right people. One of the most important skills for any entrepreneur to learn to listen.

In a few minutes I will place my keycard on David’s desk and walk out of the TechStars office for one last time.

This has been an incredible summer. I have learned more than I could have ever imagined. I know that the people I met here will be friends for life. We’re forever grateful to the TechStars mentors and the Boulder community for investing countless hours towards our success. The TechStars program exceeded my expectations in every way possible.

The cool thing is, we’re just getting started! We built our current product in three months.  Just wait till you see what we have in a year!

There is a beautiful venue in Denver called Red Rocks.  The variety of shows offered there would tempt me - if only I knew about them in time.  Now, if they had an RSS feed of their upcoming shows it would be different - but they don’t.

And Red Rocks are not alone. There are thousands of websites on the internet that have interesting content, but don’t provide a convenient way for me to consume it.

Thankfully a new service called feedity has come to my rescue. Their tool allows you to create an RSS feed for any website! So if you want an RSS feed for Red Rocks - no problem!

Update: Feedity also allows you to customize which content makes it into the RSS feed. For example, here’s an updated feed that includes the dates for each show at Red Rocks.