Automate Your Business

Archive for April, 2009

I’m just about to update WordPress and the theme on this site, so if things look a little funky round here for the next day or two, you know why.

Wish me luck….

After years of hearing about Paypal scams and managing to avoid every one, I got caught out this week…

… by Paypal themselves.

They’ve spent a long time saying “If you end up at a domain that is not Paypal.com, don’t do anything, as it’s not our domain”.

When I now go to Paypal.com, I end up at https://www.paypal-business.co.uk/ , which IS a legimate paypal site.

But it took me a long time of scouting around to confirm that it was legitimate.

Why, Paypal, why?

I’ve been using GetResponse for a long time now for my mailing list management, but every so often I realise that they seriously lack a decent reporting suite.

For example, late last night I sent an email announcement to some of my lists about the Cpanel backup script I just released.

And I did it at about 12:30 in the morning, when I was tired. When I logged in this morning to see the response, I couldn’t remember whether I had only sent it to the generic updates list for this site, or to other, more targetted lists.

And GetResponse couldn’t tell me. The broadcast details were available (subject line, content, etc), but nothing about which lists or how many people it was sent to.

That’s pretty poor.

So my solution is as follows, and I’m hoping you find it useful if you use GetResponse or another mailing list provider.

The Easy Solution:

First, set up a domain to allow catchall email address.

Second, add email filters for addresses like “webmaster@domain.com”, including ‘admin’, ‘support’, and ‘sales’. Keep adding to this list as time goes on and you find specific addresses getting a lot of spam

Third, to each of your mailing lists, add a new subscriber with a name of “TEST ADDRESS”, and emails like the following:

thislist@yourdomain.com
thatlist@yourdomain.com
thirdlist@yourdomain.com

where the bit before the ‘@’ is the name for the list in GetResponse.

Then obviously set up your email client to read the catchall email address.

And then save all those mails. That way, to know which lists got a broadcast, you simply loop through all the emailed copies of the broadcast, and check the “To” address to find out which list that address was on.

The Harder Solution:
Don’t set up a wildcard address.

Then for each list you set up at GetResponse, create a forwarder with an address like the examples above, and forward those mails to one of your regular email accounts.

Hope that all helps!

I’ve just released my Cpanel backup script, which I’ve been using personally for about the last two months or so. There is a one-week email subscriber discount available, so if you’re not yet an email subscriber, the form to join is over there on the right (if you’re reading this via the web), or at http://www.automateyourbusiness.com/updates/ if you’re reading via RSS or somehow on another site.

The script automatically triggers Cpanel to create a new backup every 24 hours, and then FTPs it to a given FTP server you define (which can be on the same domain, or another domain, or even on your PC).

Click here to find out more about it.

If you live in a country where Paypal doesn’t work, or if you simply don’t want to use Paypal, then the scheduler is now available through moneybookers.