Information & Advise

We offer the following information, white papers, advise, and recommendations as a service to our clients and visitors.
 

•  Custom Software Or Commercial-Of-The-Shelf

A perennial decision for companies is whether it's better to buy a commercial, of-the-shelf (COTS)solution that needs to them be tailored or customized to meet your company's needs, or is it better to develop a custom software solution (either in-house or via contract) to meet your company's specific needs.
        COTS vs Custom Software 

After reading this independent article on the subject, we recommend that your decision should consider all of the following:

• First and most importantly, how well will the COTS system meets your requirements?  Too often a COTS system, even one tailored to your needs, still doesn't really meet your requirements and needs nor boost profits
   

• Initial COTS cost
   

• Cost of tailoring or customizing that COTS to your needs,
   

• Training costs, since often using a COTS system that must meet the requirements and preferences of the widest possible market needs lots of training and support to use.  On the other hand, a custom solutions can be built to perfectly meet your exact needs and the user interface preferences of your users (e.g. a COTS system might have a browser based interface which frustrates touch typists with it's mouse-centric interface while a custom solution can be developed to be keyboard centric and have a user interface identical to existing programs they use; thereby dramatically cutting training costs.)
   

• Total lifecycle costs (e.g. ongoing COTS licensing and maintenance contract costs, COTS system management costs, etc.).  Licensing and maintenance contract costs that usually aren't present with custom solutions, since you own the software.
         
   

• AntiSpam Strategy

Instead of relying on white-lists, expensive and complicated spam filters, our antispam strategy aims to prevent your e-mail address from falling into the hands of spammers.  We recommend a 2-prong strategy

    1^st PRONG:

        First, begin by getting an e-mail account that lets you create aliases.  An alias is an e-mail address that people use, but that isn't tied to an actual mailbox.  For example, you can get a personal e-mail account at www.1and1.com for $0.99 per month that will give you 5 mailboxes and 400 aliases.  So you could create a primary mailbox like: MyMailBox@BruceBalent.com
        Next, create an alias for each person, website, company, etc. that requests your e-mail address.  These can be things like:
            box1@BruceBalent.com

            box2@BruceBalent.com

            etc.

A simple two column spreadsheet or database lets you keep track of which Email alias is assigned to each company, website or person.
        Finally, forward mail from each of these aliases to your real mailbox (i.e. MyMailBox@BruceBalent.com).  This arrangement give you only one mailbox to check while hiding your real e-mail address from everyone!  Then, if one of your aliases gets compromised and starts being spammed, you can just delete that alias without having to change your e-mail address with everyone else.  Giving each person, company, website it's own unique alias to use for contacting you has the added benefit of telling you exactly which company or website sold or gave your e-mail address to spammers or has such lax security that their records were hacked by spammers.  This gives you the opportunity to decide if you want to keep doing business or visiting that website.
 

    2^nd PRONG:

        The 2nd prong of our recommended strategy focuses on preventing spambots from harvesting one or more of your aliases.  A spambot is a piece of software that spammers turn loose on the internet to look for and harvest e-mail addresses.  They're looking for the standard e-mail format of: something@something.com (or .net etc.)  This is accomplished by never posting your e-mail alias on the Internet (e.g. FaceBook, website, MySpace, Twitter, etc.) as text in the standard e-mail format.  Instead you post your e-mail alias as either a picture (if the website accepts pictures like a .gif or .jpg) like our e-mail address at the bottom of this page, or as text in a non-Email format.
    A picture of your Email alias can be created with most any graphics program and then exported to a .gif or .jpg or copied-and-pasted into a website.   

    The simplest human-readable, textual way of displaying your Email alias that thwart's or defeats most spambots is:

        something <at> something <dot> com

Most humans understand to replace the <at> with @ and the <dot> with a period.

Using these techniques our clients and us have cut spam fron several thousand per month to one  spam attack to one alias every few months.  In each case, the spam attacks have been stopped cold by simply deleting the compromised alias and giving that person, company, or website a new alias if they weren't complicent in spam attack.