Category: Client Updates

Background

As a designer with a preference for UX design, I’ve had to learn scripting languages when interactive design emerged in the 90’s. Software like Macromind, then Macromedia Director and later Flash used ECMA based Action Script for example. This and JavaScript were and remain big challenges.

Building websites continued to challenge my abilities as I started hosting, then managed hosting and now some fairly complex CDN Virtual Machine setups in Google Cloud Compute. Cloud Domain and Cloud DNS management have become common in my day to day. But email configurations have been challenging to learn.

Today I found myself finally understanding some of the complexities in level 1 email hosting. Please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t enjoy email server issues. However, in the ever-evolving world of technology, email remains a vital communication tool for businesses. Ensuring the proper configuration of email systems is not just about deliverability; it’s about security, integrity, and trust. I also like to keep technology disruptions to an absolute minimum.

As someone who has now navigated the intricate landscapes of email configuration, I recently faced a challenge that I’d like to share. If you’re reading this please stop. Go do something fun. If you’re a recruiter, you have better things to do. I leaned on ChatGPT for entire sections of the post below. So you may not even be reading what I wrote.

But if you must, this is the story of how I tackled complex email issues involving SPF, DKIM, and PTR records.

Section 1: Understanding the Challenge

SPF Records: Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is a crucial part of email authentication. It helps receiving servers verify that the email comes from a trusted source. A misconfiguration here can lead to emails being marked as spam or rejected altogether.

DKIM Records: DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) ensures the integrity of the email content by signing it with a cryptographic key. A proper DKIM setup is vital for trust, but it can be tricky to configure, especially with long keys.

PTR Records: Pointer (PTR) records are used in reverse DNS lookups, allowing receiving servers to verify the hostname of the sending server. A valid PTR record enhances email deliverability.

The Complexity: These configurations are intricate and interwoven. A single mistake can lead to delivery failures, bounce-backs, and security vulnerabilities.

Section 2: Navigating the Solution

Analyzing the Error Messages: The journey began with a perplexing error message: “550 5.7.1 Relaying denied.” This was sent to me via screenshot from a client. Through careful analysis and collaboration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, I dissected the error to pinpoint the underlying issues.

SPF Configuration: The SPF record required alignment with the IP address and included domains. I configured it both in cPanel and Cloud DNS, ensuring consistency.

DKIM Configuration: The DKIM record presented a unique challenge. The long cryptographic key had to be split into smaller parts to be accepted by the DNS provider. If you’ve experienced the help text in Google Cloud DNS you know it can be somewhat helpful.

PTR Verification: Verifying the PTR record required using command-line tools like nslookup for example. The result confirmed a proper configuration, aligning the IP address with the correct hostname.

Section 3: Lessons Learned

Importance of Testing: This experience reinforced the need for thorough testing and validation. Tools like Verisign Labs, MX Toolbox for lookups and Microsoft Terminal helped confirmed discrepancies and resolutions.

Collaboration and Support: Working with experts and leveraging available resources can lead to successful outcomes. OpenAI’s ChatGPT provided invaluable support, demonstrating the power of collaboration.

Adaptability: The ability to adapt and find creative solutions to unexpected challenges was key to success. From splitting the DKIM key to aligning SPF records, adaptability was at the core of this journey. Yes, “journey!” Thanks ChatGPT.

Conclusion

Navigating the complex world of email configuration is no small feat for this designer. This journey through SPF, DKIM, and PTR records was a testament to the importance of attention to detail, collaboration, and adaptability. If you find yourself facing similar challenges, know that you’re not alone. With the right approach and a willingness to seek guidance, even the most complex email issues can be resolved. If you’re not using ChatGPT to elevate your game and expand into new arenas, the time has come. Although I think I’m starting to write like a bot.

Feel free to reach out to me for assistance with your email configuration needs. Together, we can ensure that your emails not only reach their destination but do so with the trust and integrity they deserve.

Service Level Agreements between a business owner and service provider can be expensive. It’s one of the top IT expenses for many growing businesses. SLAs play an important role for businesses that cannot afford to lose online services. Or a more accurate description would be, businesses that want to be compensated when services go down.

Disruptions to online shops, automated services, communications, productivity, it goes on and on. The more you rely on revenue from the Internet, the more you are susceptible. Some of the most frequent and worst outages occur at the Internet backbone level. This is where access to the internet becomes slow or unavailable. A service disruption at Amazon is more likely and could affect your marketing emails served by smaller provider who rely on those services. For example, an automated email scheduled to send from MailChimp could be delayed as a result of an Amazon service disruption. As we centralize storage and computing of data at large data warehouses like Amazon and Google a chain reaction occurs during downtime. For example, your website is hosted at a Google Data Center in Iowa. Other major hosting providers like Siteground host in the same data center. Once broken the chain can affects everything all the way down to your smartwatch. So SLAs are important to hedge against lost service. Our Google Workspace and Google Cloud Compute clients have SLAs. But the actual value of these SLAs primarily exist in very large budgets when millions of user accounts are affected.

We could provide and have provided SLAs to clients. Today the costs are often prohibitive. Over the years downtime at hosting providers has become less of an issue as they move to larger data centers with redundancy. An SLA costing $500 to $750 per month could give you peace of mind but it’s likely not what you think or what you need.

If we sold you an SLA we would be promising you monetary compensation if our services go down. The realized benefit is limited because disruptions and outages are calculated on a monthly basis. An hour of downtime on a busy Monday morning may not result in compensation unless the downtime resulted in an average monthly uptime drop below say, “95%”.

Because we use Google services for your platform we, like you are still at the mercy of the providers to restore service during an outage. When a service disruption occurs we also wait for service to be restored. We would check last backup integrity, monitor and report progress. This is good for peace of mind but it’s not great for your R.O.I. Especially considering Google service disruptions affect our clients a couple times every few years.

For example, the huge service outage you may have read about last night caused gmail to go down for a small portion of users for 24 minutes. The truth is very different from the stories, at least that’s what we see in your dashboards. For example, this so-called, “widespread outtage” was likely imperceivable by any of our clients or their team members. We hear things like, “yeah, google was acting a little funky” but we cannot be 100% certain the funkiness was a Google issue.

In fact, your Google Admin Dashboard is nearly always above 99.00%. Again, this is calculated over a month so as always the details reveal the real issue. In this case the 1% of downtime experienced in 2020 could happen at the exact time you are trying to warn your team about a virus circulating through your office wi-fi. In this case 1% downtime can be incredibly frustrating and the SLA would automatically credit your account for a few days or dollars of service time. The $2-$5 dollars compensation or free day of service essentially nullifies the value of the SLA. What you really want is someone to be responsible for monitoring and reporting problems to you that are affecting your online business. That’s what we do for managed hosting and marketing services for clients. It’s less of a feature and more of a commitment.

For the reasons mentioned above, uptime is of course critical during certain minutes of the day. But disruption or outtage reporting should not cost you $500 per month. Especially for a healthy business with great backup and retore processes. What you really want is to only pay for SLA services during a problem. It doesn’t mean your other software and hardware doesn’t experience downtime and we’re available to help. Your Google Workspace Account is covered by this SLA.

That’s exactly what our managed hosting clients receive. We don’t report issues that do not and likely will not ever affect your business. From time zone and data center locations to the way you use Google services in your business, you simply do not need to know when the Singapore data center is having a ten minute service disruption for 10% of local users in Singapore at 3am HST. You need to know your online business is protected with standard operating procedures that work. Especially your website security. Security is a much larger threat and a considerable amount of energy is placed in your website security. You really want to know your data is safe. That’s what we do and that’s what you get when you trust us with your online business services. Your security information is always available in your WordPress dashboard. You can always take a look at the Google Workspace Status Dashboard and make your own decision.

But we also want to hear your experience. Did you notice any service disruption? Any funkiness in your Google services i.e.; Gmail, Drive/Docs/Sheets, Calendar or other on any device?

The end of the year for small business owners is an important reflection period. We reflect on our direction for the coming year. We reflect on our achievements in service to our customers and we reflect on the aspects of our business that resulted in new business.

2017 marked a seminal year in the aggregation, dissemination and use of facts in local marketing in Hawaii. 2017 marked a shift in awareness for business owners and it seems Google, our largest data provider for client efforts, agrees.

Google is sharing a year-end review that I feel would be helpful for our clients. It’s always important to keep these facts in the context of our local markets. Our values and our customers are unique.

“Local” rules our decisions and sales. Tourism plays an incredibly important role for many of you and the way we reach our customers online has changed.  Whether you’re connecting to travelers before they arrive or using new techniques to stay connected with your customers, we’ve been there to help you grow. 2017 on Hawaii Island marked the end of the desktop/laptop-centric approach to marketing and web development.

Local customers now insist on a mobile-first experience online. In fact, your numbers on average have shifted from about 30% online visits to over 50% today. The facts demonstrate a specific need to serve and attract customers on mobile devices, specifically a phone. As a client of Brent.FM we have prepared your website, your hosting environment and social networking efforts. We are serving many of you with Google Ads that trigger for local mobile phone users. When your customers are near you or search for you online they see your brand first. We need to continue to step up these efforts. We have ideas, knowledge and specific methods to help you maintain an advantage in your industry. We’ll be communicating these needs with you in the coming weeks and months in hopes that we can continue to grow your online business and mobile offerings. The numbers are still growing and will be here soon for Hawaii Island.

Did you know that nearly two-thirds of smartphone users are more likely to purchase from companies whose mobile sites or apps customize information to their location? Or that 47% of millennials say they’ve watched YouTube videos to improve their health or feel better after feeling down?

Please have a look at Google’s year-end data wrap-up.

A collection of our favorite industry, consumer, and video insights from 2017 that will continue to shape the marketing industry in 2018. Hawaii will continue to benefit from additional bandwidth and access to online businesses that stay relevant and increase online service. We want to be part of your growth and strive to be your most rewarding business partnership.

Please let me know how I can increase my quality and service to your business or organization.

[contact-form-7 id=”25081″ title=”Contact Page – Thank you, looking forward to connecting!”]

“Today, people can access a near-infinite amount of content anywhere, and anytime, across almost every screen. While reaching people is easy, keeping their attention is harder than ever and requires a different approach to video marketing—for both creative and media plans.” –Matt Anderson, Contributor, Video Marketing at Google

“Digital can no longer be a one-size-fits-all, repurposed afterthought. Nowhere do consumers expect relevancy more than in digital. The brands that are winning are thinking about all the iterations of creative they need to deliver personal and relevant messages.” – Helen Lin, President of Digital Investment, Publicis Media

How Can This Help Your Local Hawaii Businesses?
Keep your message local and authentic. Use an editorial calendar to plan your messaging for key local holidays that larger brands miss.

“To grab users’ attention, you really have to tailor your creative to each platform. You can’t be focused on one piece of creative for one platform, and not think about how to make it most effective across the ecosystem. One way we do that is by giving our creatives access to real-time data to optimize performance in flight—not after.” – Gail Horwood, SVP Integrated Marketing, Kellogg Company

How Can This Help Your Local Hawaii Businesses?
Place your authentic ad, get enough results to be confident you have reached your audience. Determine why they took action and re-tailor your message and graphic to focus more on that audience. Focus on what works.

“When it comes to capturing and holding attention, there isn’t one ad format to rule them all. On YouTube, for example, it’s not just that a bumper ad allows for different storytelling than a skippable unit or a forced 15-second ad, but that one story can be told across ad units through sequencing and targeting. This approach allows each ad format to work to its abilities without having to cram the whole world into one place.” – Kim Snow, Creative Director, Google

How Can This Help Your Local Hawaii Businesses?
For smaller budgets, a minor variation in your ad from platform to platform can make a difference. Use a similar, yet different image to expound on the story you’re telling. You can’t determine the order they will see your ad but you can build up the mundane into uniqueness for pennies.

“To capture attention, we avoid creating all the content for a campaign at once. As marketers, we spend a lot of time in conference rooms. We’d rather understand the feedback from the audience bit by bit. In that way, we take consumer response and create content off of it that’s personal and relevant.” – Heather Warnke, Director of Marketing, John Frieda

How Can This Help Your Local Hawaii Businesses?
Stay focused on delivering an authentic message. Create that which others will want to share by continually improving your message for your target audience. Visualize your best customers, the ones who will reshare your message. Give them something empowering to their business that they can share with their customers.

“Our research shows that consumers are getting impatient and are shifting their attention from one source to another at a faster pace than ever before. For brands, it means the bar continues to raise. Research shows being useful and relevant is the only way to get consumers to tune-in. Brands should also prioritize platforms that have content people are actually looking for versus just finding in a feed, as lean in platforms grab higher attention.” – Kate Sirkin, EVP, Analytics and Insights, Publicis Media

How Can This Help Your Local Hawaii Businesses?
Be the source. Help your customers share their enthusiasm for your offerings. Do the extra work it takes to be the source and provide relevant, useful information in your campaigns.

Determine your game plan

Fighting blind in the battle for attention is not a life sentence. It’s a choice.

There’s no magic formula for earning a potential customer’s attention, but there are certain principles brands can lean on, including those I just outlined and many more. At a higher level, there’s one simple question I encourage you to ask to determine a game plan for navigating today’s increasingly complex attention economy: Are you spending on the right platforms, and are you leveraging the tools of each in a way that will help you capture and keep consumer attention?

Answer that honestly, and you’ll be on your way to a fairer fight. -View more from ThinkwithGoogle

I recently read that focus is the new IQ. Nowhere else is this more visible or true than web design hosting. At least it’s of epic importance in my business. Today I’m sharing with you the “why” behind focus and attention in your online business growth.

In your business, focus on your customer can mean the following;

• Permission-based marketing that’s personalized. Delivering the information your customers need to make informed decisions keeps them coming back to your emails for more.
• Customer-focused web design. Keeping the content that’s most important to your visitors above the fold is key. Attention spans are what they are and being mindful of the limited time your visitors can spend on your site is important. So be sure the information your visitors need is viewable when your page loads.
• Mobile design. Nothing else is more helpful right now. We’ve seen mobile visits go from around 30% to around 50% in the past year for local clients. Mainland clients have been steady at 50% for the last year.
• Business Intelligence. You need to make informed decisions about your business using facts, not email suggestions from desperate 14 yr olds in Asia.

Attention Means Being Attentive to Your Business and Clients Needs

Many local clients are still warming up to logging into multiple dashboards. For the last several years you have had access to your website traffic, most visited pages, seo analysis, security and performance data. This is viewable above the fold on the first page when you log into your WordPress dashboard. Permission-based marketing campaigns in Mailchimp and Constant Contact still require logging into those services. There are only a few other areas in your business where you can obtain this level of information about your website visitors, prospects, leads, and clients. So I’m encouraging you again to keep those login credentials handy and a shortcut to your dashboard in the middle of your screen. Your attention to these metrics is critical in determining whether you should be spending more or less on IT.

Use the information to create budgets, gauge how well your website and web hosting is performing and make informed decisions about attracting and engaging new business. Doing so will give you the ability to be more attentive to the needs of your visitors and clients instead of just focusing on your immediate business needs. You’ll do well. I’m counting on you!

Once Attention is Working Stay Focused – Focus Focus Focus!

Your ability to focus is critical. All of the information is right here in your browser. That’s great but following the information among a myriad of distractions is difficult. For example, some clients prefer automation for their posts so they are shared on social media when published. There are a lot of reasons for doing so, especially for clients who publish more than once per week. However, automation can also save time by allowing you to keep your focus on your business, your website. By not having to visit Twitter or Facebook to publish, you’re also avoiding distractions. For small business owners, our tools built into your site can be a real time saver.

Dig in Deeper with this Article About Customer Focus and Attention to Attract and Engage Clients

“Attention Attention, attention, attention—this is the variable we’re most interested in to drive real brand lift. It’s important to ask: Are you capturing your audience’s attention? How are you measuring this? Your metric should be determined by your objective—learn more about identifying and optimising to your KPIs here.” –ThinkWithGoogle

Here’s a class that will help improve your focus and attention:
https://www.udemy.com/focus-mastery/

Two-minute refresher on the basics:

This Forbes article could be helpful:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2016/02/23/7-superstar-secrets-to-focusing-in-an-age-of-distraction/#1991b36a6b10

Now that you’ve completely lost focus, call me! I want to help you reduce your IT costs and get the money flowing into the tasks that bring you more business. For additional support, tools and know-how in support of your goals call us. We don’t care what you call us, just call us! Ask for Brent: 808-896-7656