Real World Computing

In this instance, the part we were interested in was the Communication Server, formerly called NTList. This product fully supports all the functions you need to build email lists that comply with the laws now pertaining to the running of such things, the main ones being the requirement for users to be asked to opt into a list and to be able to resign at any time. The list server will also automatically send out a 'list charter' on a regular basis, outlining the principles of your list and its terms of membership.

Communication Server can operate with other email servers, but for ease of use and setting up Gordano recommends that you use its own mail server, which ships with it. There's one little catch here, though: GMS has to be the only SMTP service on a particular IP address, and by default it will listen on all IP addresses for SMTP, which means that any other SMTP service will either cease to work or else stop GMS from working, neither of which is desirable. In our setup, we decided to use a machine in the rack that was being used only to run log analysis and other monitoring services, but it was employing the IIS SMTP service to send out email-monitoring reports. Obviously, we wanted this service to continue working, so we bound an extra IP address to the machine and configured GMS to look just at this address: then we configured the IIS SMTP service to listen only on its own IP addresses and not on the one for GMS. Once this was done, both SMTP services worked quite happily together.

GMS is already admirably customisable, but if you need to extend things even further there's a full scripting language called MML (mail meta language) that enables server-side commands to be built into your email messages via special tags. Such commands can be used to achieve something as simple as customising each message to include the recipient's name, or something more advanced - it's really up to you how far you want to take things.

List servers were invented in the early days of the Internet as a way for people to discuss topics with other like-minded people in an open fashion, a function that's been superseded in many cases by web-based forums or IM services. Nevertheless, the traceability and archival features of email lists still make them particularly suitable for some applications. We find, however, that most of our clients want to use lists as a way of distributing information to customers, in a one-way process rather than the traditional two-way use of a list server. Achieving this requires you to turn many of its functions off, but Gordano provides a wizard to do such basic configuring. If you need multiple lists that are similar, as this particular client did, there's a Copy button in the web interface to do this easily, which saves an incredible amount of work. All the messages that the list server sends to members and administrators are customisable on a per-list basis from the web-based administration screens.

Fight Club

Want to know if your website has more links in Google than your competitors? Okay, in the best traditions of playground justice, how about fighting for it? Just go to www.googlefight.com and enter a couple of keywords into the boxes, perhaps the name of your product or website against that of your competitors. Click the Fight button, then sit back and watch the animation of a couple of stick men fighting - the result is shown in two columns containing a count, each representing one of the keywords you entered, with its height depending on the number of results returned from Google.

Continued....