Some recent activity at the internal 37signals Campfire chat room.
New feature at Amazon
| Jason F. | Neat new feature on Amazon… |
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"Most Helpful" good and bad review |
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| Mark I. | I noticed that the other day. Amazon felt like it didn’t change much for a long time, but over the past several months they’ve made a bunch of nice tweaks. |
| Jason F. | I like their redesign. |
| Mark I. | Just renewed my Amazon Prime membership the other day. |
It’s such a no-brainer. |
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I ordered four gifts for my kids the other day, one at a time and didn’t worry about bundling the purchases up to save shipping. |
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That’s the one feature I really want that they won’t give me: the ability to filter results by Prime status. |
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| Jeremy K. | Mark – you can limit Seller to Amazon.com |
| Mark I. | I didn’t realize that. |
Full Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in 37signals.
EVDO
| Mark I. | My cable went down last night in the middle of all that drama. I was very happy to have EVDO at that point. :) |
| Jason F. | Oh Mark how has that been BTW? The EVDO? |
| Mark I. | It rocks. |
I was getting just under T1 speed. |
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| Jason F. | no kidding. wow. |
| Mark I. | At 4 out of 5 bars. |
I’m very happy with it. |
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| Jason F. | And how much is it per month? |
| Mark I. | $60 |
It’s dirt cheap. |
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| Jason F. | Unlimited access? |
This is through Sprint, right? |
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| Mark I. | Yep. |
Sprint has the best EVDO network right now. |
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| Jason F. | And what USB "card" do you have? |
| Jason F. | I may sign up for emergency access. |
My cable connection has been a bit unpredictable lately. |
Gmail spam filtering
| Jason F. | FYI, filtering my email through Gmail first has eliminated nearly 1000 spams that would usually make it through to my inbox. |
I highly recommend it if you have a spam problem |
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| David H. | gmail def seems better than spamsieve |
| Jason F. | yeah and I have SpamSieve running also |
But it was just not making the cut based on the # of spam I have |
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It caught a lot, but I get nearly 2000 a day so even a few percent was dropping 50-100 in my inbox a day |
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Gmail is catching almost evertyhing |
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| David H. | I think I’m going to jump on that. |
Tips
| Ryan S. |
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why do apps offer "tips" when you start? |
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i don’t want a "tip". i don’t even know how the app works yet |
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it sounds like a game or something |
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"want a hint?" |
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| Jason F. | "Tips" is the wrong word, agree |
Tim
on 13 Dec 07For some reason I thought I once read that 37signals uses Gmail (google aps for your domain) as your e-mail service provider.
Is that not the case?
From this post, it sounds like you host your own mail server.
MI
on 13 Dec 07Tim, we use GMail to handle our support email but the rest of our email is handled with traditional POP from our own servers.
Chad
on 13 Dec 07Gmail is a rock solid spam filter. I’ve actually had clients complain that they’re not getting email anymore… in reality, gmail is just catching all the spam that they were so used to getting. That’s always a funny conversation… you were using spam as a heartbeat for your email…
Tim
on 13 Dec 07@MI
I assume you mean all of the support@[37s product name].com accounts reside on Google’s servers and not your own.
I’m curious to know though, how is it possible to use Gmail for some but not all 37signals e-mail accounts?
Jose
on 13 Dec 07Who have SvN in Safari’s Bookmark Bar, please raise your hands!
Fast commenting going on, lol
Clyde
on 13 Dec 07What method for filtering mail through Gmail do you use?
Felipe Koch
on 13 Dec 07I don`t get the disclaimer about full disclosure. Why is it there?
Eric
on 13 Dec 07While EVDO can be nice it is expensive; remember that Verizon has the old “National Access/1x” legacy network that’s a feeble 100kb/s but if you know what you are doing it only uses minutes and great for emergency access. Actually there are ways to get cheap EVDO access as well, but those are much more involved. A quick check of howard forums should turn up all the information you need.
Brandon Walsh
on 13 Dec 07Agreed on Gmail! I’ve been using it since it was invite only, and I get maybe one or two spam messages a week. Not that I get a huge amount of email, but I never worry about using my real address on potentially sketchy websites.
MI
on 14 Dec 07Tim: We run our own mail servers and simply forward the support email addresses to a GMail account. Nothing special about it.
Andy
on 14 Dec 07How to you limit Amazon searches to just Amazon.com products. I’ve never been able to figure this out and I just tried and don’t see that as an option.
Robert
on 14 Dec 07Without being 100% certain, I believe Prime is available to other Amazon sellers (though certainly in the minority).
Michael
on 14 Dec 07I have had many problems with Gmail’s spam filter and false positives. The problem has been particularly bad for mail that I have Gmail download from my Verizon POP account using its POP fetcher feature—even though Gmail is supposed to whitelist any mail coming from known contacts, it doesn’t appear to do so with fetched POP3 mail, so a lot of messages from known contacts has wound up marked as spam.
I have had to take to checking the spam box several times a week to make sure I haven’t missed anything…sigh.
clifyt
on 14 Dec 07The whole prime thing is one of the few things things that piss me off about Amazon.
And it shouldn’t, because everything else is just right.
To use prime, it has to be an amazon product or shipped by amazon. It seems MOST of the products on their site are solely using the Amazon cart software…at least what I’m looking for. And when this isn’t the case, the price differential in those that are offered both from Amazon and another reseller are almost exactly the same when you add in shipping (i.e., $25+ is free on Amazon, $75 gets you ‘free’ shipping all year round…and when I look at the other guys, their prices are generally $4 or $5 less than Amazon’s + $4 or $5 shipping making the shipping essentially free in comparison).
So even though I was initially a Prime subscriber, I never re-upped. I buy quite a bit through Amazon as it is, but it really never panned out. Didn’t feel like giving a $75 tip to a multi-billion dollar company.
Just so it doesn’t look like I’m pissing on Amazon—the one Amazon company that does well with their shipping is Endless.com. Free (or according to their promotion Negative $5…you get five off the price) overnight shipping with an interface that tells you how long you have to order to get it the next day. From what I understand, it is supposed to be a test-bed interface for the Amazon Of Tomorrow, and if it is, it really is a great interface.
Randal L. Schwartz
on 14 Dec 07Actually, both Verizon and Sprint have nationally deployed EVDO-A. In fact, they roam on each other’s towers, so there’s basically no coverage area difference! Sprint has true “unlimited” service: no stories yet about anyone being booted for using “too many” bits. Verizon has two drawbacks: they have a limit (about 5G or 10G per month), a particularly annoying EULA to officially restrict what the bits are, and to get the $60 price, you have to also be a cell customer. Sprint just has $60/month, and no annoying EULA.
I say this as a former customer of Verizon who was booted because I was downloading podcasts(!) and managed to exceed the (then) undocumented 5G limit, and now a happy customer of Sprint.
And no, you wouldn’t want to use this as your primary connection, but as a backup or mobile connection, it rocks!
Anonymous Coward
on 14 Dec 07Also re: Amazon redesign, I love that they show the distribution of ratings now (I think Netflix had it first?). I just wish there was a way to sort results such that it would surface those items with a bimodal rating distribution – items that people love or hate.
Morten
on 14 Dec 07It would be interesting if Google productized a variant of a GMail account as a hosted spam filter.
I’ve been toying with using GMail as a spam filter for hosted applications. If it wasn’t for their terms stating that a GMail account is for personal use, and then a dash of concern that they would blacklist us for forwarding our *.domain.com SMTP traffic to a single GMail account, I’d be using that approach right now.
But I think it would be a really nice pay-to-use product for them to ship and it’s all there, fully functional, now. They could use a little UI tweaking and then they would have a great hosted spam filter for the small business, with a nice administrative interface for managing false positives etc. already built in.
Joe Parker
on 14 Dec 07@Jason -
I have a spotty cable connection, too. Instead of EVDO as a backup, I signed up for a cheap DSL plan and use a “D-Link DI-LB604 4-Port Load Balancing Router” that takes a signal from both modems.
Now when the cable or DSL goes down, I keep browsing and don’t even notice.
Jay-P
on 14 Dec 07I just renewed my New York Public Library Prime card. No brainer.
GeeIWonder
on 14 Dec 07Jesus. With a $125 router and TWO internet connection plans, I should not. Maybe you should get a T1 just in case though.
Felipe Koch
on 14 Dec 07@ Morten
postini.com was acquired by Google.
We use in the company I work for and in several of our clients. The filtering is VERY good.
Basically you change your MX record to their server and then their server delivers all messages to your server.
A good interface (gets time getting used to) and a very good (and $3/mbox cheap) service makes it a very good option.
Douglas
on 14 Dec 07I’m interested to know, if “tip” is the wrong word (it possibly is), what would you say is the right one? Or are “tips” just a refuge of a bad designer?
Pete
on 14 Dec 07I LOVE amazon prime. Now I buy everything from that damn site. The only thing is that I feel guilty for all the cardboard waste that I am generating. They seem to ship me little things in huge boxes and I had to get a second recycling container. I wish they coudl figure out a way to pack things using less volume.
I would also not mind consolidating orders from time to time if this helped.
Mike
on 15 Dec 07Not everything Amazon sells is eligible for Amazon Prime, usually things that cannot be shipped via air- like ink cartridges, etc.
Mike
on 15 Dec 07@Morten Unless I misunderstand you, if you wanted to filter through Google but not worry about the personal use problem, you could use the free version of Google Apps for small business.
Afternoon
on 17 Dec 07Prime is a good example of a service which hides environmental cost.
Splitting a given order into multiple deliveries most likely means greater carbon emissions and more packaging for that order. Paying per-delivery exposes the customer to the environmental cost, a positive side-effect. It makes it easier for people to be green.
Andrew
on 17 Dec 07For those who don’t get the full discloser:
“Jeffrey Preston Bezos (born January 12, 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico ) is the founder, president, chief executive officer and chairman of the board of Amazon.com”
Basically, they didn’t want to be accused of blatently advertising Amazon because the founder of Amazon invests in 37Signals.
This discussion is closed.