FolderShare

November 14, 2005

I ran across a brief blurb on Digg.com about FolderShare now being free since Microsoft had bought it. I had not run across FolderShare before and was intrigued by the marketing literature:

FolderShare™ allows you to create a private peer-to-peer network that will help you to synchronize files across multiple devices and access or share files with colleagues and friends. You no longer need to send large files via email, burn them to CDs/DVDs and mail them, or upload them to a website. FolderShare allows you to share and sync important information instantly with anyone you invite, making it the perfect solution for personal or small business use.

One of the things that really intrigued me was this statement:

Unlimited file space - Store as many files as you wish; you are only limited by the storage capacity of your device

There were many times I thought of using some type of subscription service to additional space, but was never impressed with the thought of having to pay good money every month to access 100MB worth of files. That’s partly the reason I have a static IP at home so that I can do all my own web hosting with no restrictions. I’m not using it for too much, but my brother has 5GB of pictures (non-porn) hosted with me. So FolderShare seemed especially intriguing given that it is free and unlimited space.

Anyway, I installed it on my home PC last night and was quite underwhelmed. I kept looking for some type of interface to select files to share but couldn’t find anthing and according to the literature, I needed a second machine added to the account for it to work.

So, here I am at work and I decided to give it a try. Some of the comments on the Digg post were skeptical that it would work through firewalls, proxies, etc. Once installed however, I didn’t have any problems connecting to my machine. I still wasn’t sure what to expect since I hadn’t configured anything at home. I kind of expected to find an empty folder with some message to configure it to share files. I certainly wasn’t expecting to find that I had complete access to all files and folders through the FolderShare web interface. That is pretty sweet!

Taking a step back, it now seems pretty obvious how it works. Basically I’ve got two peer to peer servers set up that are communicating with each other. For some reason, I thought that files would be stored elsewhere. This seems like the ideal situation for p2p and I can see why Microsoft has invested in it. Especially with the memo sent out by Gates and Ozzie a couple weeks ago.

Has anyone else tried out FolderShare? What are your thoughts?

Popularity: 3% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under Recommended | Leave a Comment 

Spam Filter

August 5, 2004

I’m starting a new category (Recommended) for services, applications, utilities, etc. that I would recommend without hesitation.

The first entry is for SpamStopsHere hosted anti-spam service. I’ve been using their service since December 2003 and I love it. I can’t recommend these guys high enough.

With the initial, default settings, SpamStopsHere will “out of the box” block 99% of all spam for most customers. We believe it is actually very close now to 99.5%. (I.e. we block 199 out of 200 spams.) If the Realtime Blacklists (RBLs) and Country Filtering are disabled, our service will still block 98% of spam; in this mode the false-positive rate will be less than 1 in 100,000 (i.e. 99.999% of legitimate email will pass).

I’ve had the same personal email address since mid 1998. Early on I was not that careful about using it to sign up for sites or post online. By 2003, I was getting 40-50 spam messages a day - not as many as some people, but more than I wanted to deal with. I needed a solution and looked at all of the available options. Most of the options involved Outlook plug-ins or extensions. I didn’t want to be burdened with constantly updating my local filters and that did nothing for me when I went out of town and checked email remotely. There were several services that would login to your email box and filter out the spam. These didn’t appeal to me either - seemed a little unreliable and not as clean as I wanted. I knew what I wanted: A service to pass my email through before it got to my mailbox or Outlook. I knew that those services existed at the ISP level (Brightmail and postini) but these are expensive services not meant for small domains. After a lot of digging, I finally ran across SpamStopsHere as a viable option for filtering family/small business domains.

SpamStopsHere is a server-based mail filtering application. No more do you have to manage and tweak and update some Outlook plug-in to keep spam out of your inbox. These guys take care of all that for you and are continuously updating their filters to catch the latest tricks. The other benefit is that it manages the spam filtering for the entire domain. I am providing filtering for the 9 members of my family (under their family plan) that use an email address under my personal domain. While $99 may be hard to justify for just one email address, the fact that I can cover 10 people for that is palatable.

It isn’t for everyone though. Two requirements: you need to own the domain that you use for email and you need to ability/capability to be able to modify the MX records on your domain. The MX record is responsible for routing your email traffic to the appropriate mail server. So for SpamStopsHere, you change your MX records to route incoming email through their servers which then filter the emails based on their rules and any clean emails are then forwarded on to your email server.

One other great feature: they also provide an anti-virus upgrade. So, for an extra $25/year, I can have them scan my email for viruses as it passes through their service. I added this earlier this year when there were so many email viruses going around. Sure, I had Norton locally to catcht them, but it was still a pain to get a popup from Norton each time an infected message came through.

I was a little reluctant to sign up for the service initially because I couldn’t find any other information on them since their product/service was so new at the time. A little research turned up another product, VEDIT, that the same company has been working on for 20+ years. That convinced me that I was dealing with someone with experience and long-term plans.

Popularity: 8% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under Recommended, Spam | 1 Comment 

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