Google Apps mail can be a great help when your servers are overloaded with traffic and just die when you send your newsletter or e-mail notifications to all your users. Then you learn about Google Apps and how you can just outsource your e-mail - personal and mass-email - to google. And it’s free! Standard version at least. Wow.

However after your first mass-mailing goes out you might find that your “domain has been disabled“. Google it, internet is full of stories of desperate admins and small business owners who can’t access their mail. Unfortunatelly standard version of Google Apps comes with no tech support - just online help. Seems fair enough. It’s free so READ THE FINE PRINT before you mass-mail your subscribers, right?

Ok, so you switch to premium paid version (40 EUR per every mail account) and hope to get some support. Just after you pay your accout gets fixed and you can send and receive e-mail again! Magic! :) But after another mass-mailing your account gets trimmed down or sth and whenever you try to send something you get a message like this:

Expected response code(s) [250] but got response [421 4.7.0 Try again later, closing connection. (MAIL)

You submit a ticket to tech support and wait. After a while they reply and tell you to check connectivity between your outgoing mail server and smtp.gmail.com with traceroute (check!). They also tell you to manualy try to reproduce the problem:

Do you have any server logs which clearly show Google shutting down the connection to your mail server? Is this reproducible by doing a manual telnet test to Google servers from a command line prompt on your mail server? Please try sending a test email from using manual telnet and see if Google closes connection on you.

The thing is you are using SSL so telnet 25 doesn’t work. You google the task at hand at come up with this procedure:

1. Login to your outgoing mail server

2. Type openssl s_client -crlf -connect smtp.gmail.com:465

3. Type EHLO <your mail server domain>, and then press ENTER

4. Type AUTH LOGIN. The server responds with an encrypted prompt for your user name (like 334 VXNlcm5hbWU6)

5. Enter your user name encrypted in base 64 - use this converter to encrypt yourname@gmail.com (use a personal e-mail account that works, not your Google Apps mail account)

6. The server responds with an encrypted base 64 prompt for your password (like 334 UGFzc3dvcmQ6). use this converter to encrypt your password - yea, I know - they can read your e-mail now ;-) so use another converter for your password, geez

7. Type MAIL FROM:<sender@domain.com> (don’t forget <>), and then press ENTER. If the sender is not permitted to send mail, the SMTP server returns an error.

8. Type RCPT TO:<recipient@remotedomain.com> (don’t forget <>), and then press ENTER. If the recipient is not a valid recipient or the server does not accept mail for this domain, the SMTP server returns an error.

9. Type DATA.

10. If desired, type message text, press ENTER, type a period (.), and then press ENTER again.

11. If mail is working properly, you should see a response similar to the following indicating that mail is queued for delivery:

250 2.0.0 OK

Note that you’ll get an error message if you don’t authenticate before sending test e-mail:

530-5.5.1 Authentication Required. Learn more at
530 5.5.1 http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=14257

Took me an hour before figuring out how to authenticate ;-) Many thanks to MS for helping me out to figure out this procedure. Who would have thought?

Anyway I sent the test e-mail so no problem there. But I still get this bugger when sending e-mail from that same account but not manualy:

Expected response code(s) [250] but got response [421 4.7.0 Try again later, closing connection. (MAIL)

Perhaps this will help solve this mistery: http://code.google.com/intl/pl/apis/apps/reporting/google_apps_reporting_api.html

Hope so…

Will keep you posted. Let me know if you have similar problems.

UPDATE: found a cool reporting library (just download into apache accessible dir, access http://yoursite/reportingdemo.php) - everything seems to be fine, but still no success with emails going out

One more memory from Kiev where I was for TMT.Ventures’08 Kiev conference. The next day we had a house party at Denis Dovgopoliy’s place. We were talking about VC business and what’s driving it. To make the long story short it’s the survival of the strongest. Meaning - who delivers the biggest growth - stays. Who fails to deliver - is out. The rule applies to both VC managers and entreprenuers. Up or out! That simple.

Because of the very unformal Ukrainian atmosphere we got creative and discussed a number of interesting, high-growth but rather controversial investment opportunities. Ideas that might work but not every VC would officially support it and some businesspeople would refuse to develop.

One of the ideas was taking advantage of our natural weaknesses - like envy or dislike for other people. Envy and dislike which we like to indulge in. There is a hater in every one of us. And that’s why anti-communities and anti-blogs have became so popular.

So we imagined an e-commerce service for people who want to send an unpleasant gift for other people whom they don’t like too much. For a fee. Anonymously. The recepient may of course return the package. For a double fee. For a premium fee the company would deliver a classic horse’s head to recepients bedroom - like in Godfather. It seemed to be a brilliant idea. And a great business.

Then I saw this a few days ago:

You can actually buy a horse’s head - a stuffed or unstuffed version. I don’t know what they stuff it with but it can’t be good. ;-)

Ok guys, who started this business without me? We were all at the party so I should get some equity, right? I could be up, but instead I’m out. ;-)

Every tech start-up and especially 2.0 start-up should practice what they preach. Meaning: if you market and sell 2.0 products you should be an enterprise 2.0 yourself. A small enterprise but still ;-)

So here you are - social networking and Web 2.0 “Best Practices” for the enterprise based on biznes.net offerings:

1. Improving collaboration among workers, project groups and departments

1.1. Utilizing the networks of contacts - corporate and private - to achieve corporate goals. Social networking is a tool of achieving business goals with support of FOAF (friend-of-a-friend) known also as six-degrees-of-separation phenomenon. You can look for customers, emploees and partners anywhere or you could ask friends for introductions. Old-school method is to go through business cards, make some calls and ask questions which is time consuming and possibly annoying when done very often. Nowadays you can browse through your friends’ contacts, do a pre-selection of promising leads and send messages or call the right people saving your and your friends time. Social networking may be especially helpful in multinational corporations where cross-corporate connectivity is important.

1.2. Corporate knowledge management - it is almost impossible to put all of corporate know-how into writing, so the only way to maintain corporate memory is to document relationships with key people with social networking software. People come and go but as long as they can be reached they can be asked for valuable project or deal details. Expert knowlegde is very rarly well documented so ability to find the right people across the multinational organization fast (ASAP) is what social networking may help with.

2. Improving office-productivity and time-efficiency away from the office

2.1. More meetings with the right people - conferences and seminars are great to do business with many people in one day as long as there is a plan and an agreement on the subject of the conversation. Many social networking websites provide a calendar of events with a list of confirmed participants. If the event fits their interests users confirm their participation with a short comment and make their business profiles available to others. Browsing through participant profiles may be followed by sending messages with individual meeting proposals at the event. Exchanging messages before the event helps to narrow down the topics to be discussed and saves time during the event enabling users to arrange more meetings in one day.

2.2. E-mail bankruptcy or E-mail 2.0 - not all e-mail messages were created equal but they clog our incoming boxes equally well. Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist from New York, declared e-mail bankruptcy because he was so far behind on email. “If you’ve sent me an email (and you aren’t my wife, partner, or colleague), you might want to send it again. I am starting over.” - he wrote on his blog. Once a killer-app and huge productivity booster over the years e-mail became an irritant and productivity killer - not mentioning incoming e-mail addiction problem. Social networking provides a reputation-based messaging solution where sender identity, reputation, background and network of contacts is well documented. This enables recipients to quickly evaluate which messages are worth the time and effort. Sending messages is not free so mass-spamming is not profitable and therefore non existent.

2.3. Getting things done - is all about managing projects, to-do lists, setting priorities and focusing only on next actions instead of all that needs to be done. Applications supporting that kind of work style are being integrated with social networking portals adding productivity tools to the social context of groups working together. “Getting Things Done®” is the work-life management system and book by David Allen that transforms personal overwhelm and overload into an integrated system of less-stress productivity.

3. Relationship Marketing through corporate and private blogs

3.1. Official corporate blogs or product blogs - such blogs are a sign of the times in which marketing has evolved from mass marketing towards relationship marketing. Creating individual relationships with the most active customers - most aware and outspoken influencers and trendsetters - is the key to building trust or confidence in the provider along with a sense of reduced anxiety and comfort in knowing what to expect. Blog readers develop a sense of familiarity and even a social relationship with their service or product providers. In practice, relationship marketing originated in industrial and B2B markets where long-term contracts have been quite common for many years. As internet became an interactive mass-medium individual customers are demanding the same level of care and personal relationships - especially from providers of relatively high value consumer products, when switching costs are high, when customers involvement in shaping products and services is high. Social networking websites for professionals are environments where corporate and product blogs may initiate free word of mouth promotions and referrals which are simply priceless.

3.2. Grassroots corporate blogs - corporate marketing departments do not have a monopoly on blogging about their companies. Sometimes to their surprise company workers spontaniously start blogging about corporate life, products and customers. Some of these blogs gain corporate support and become an important element of corporate culture - within new company policies on blogging and disclosing documents, procedures and other kinds of information.

3.3. Project group blogs - small teams and project groups discover new tools of tracking their progress, stimulating discussion, documenting know-how and brainstorming sessions. Tools of conducting every day business like blogs and wikis are becoming a valuable addition to corporate culture.

3.4. Market research blogs - discussion forums have always been a pool of valuable consumer generated data. Blogs enable marketing and R&D departments to stimulate more structured discussion and ask questions directly.

Some quotes (from News.com):

“Adoption of blogs, wikis and social software within business applications is in its early days but I see potential for them to take hold slowly.” said Andrew McAfee, an associate professor at the Harvard Business School, said at the Collaborative Technology Conference last week.

In the past when it came to adopting new technology, corporations were on the leading edge and consumers were underserved. That’s all turned around now, said Rajen Sheth, product manager at Google Enterprise.

“The currency is different in consumer applications. Individual consumers want to save time and be more productive. In business, you’re trying to make a group more productive,” said Christian Heidelberger, CEO of Nexaweb Technologies.

These Web 2.0 technologies won’t necessarily replace complicated and more structured content or document management systems, analysts said.

But new Web standard products could push people to stop using e-mail to share documents and instead collaborate through shared workspaces like wikis.

Allowing employees to share information through blogs or mashups with outside Web services poses significant security challenges for corporate customers, analysts said.

Promoting ad hoc collaboration and multiple modes of communication can be beneficial, but employees need policies and IT administrators need tools to govern those policies, said John Crupi, CTO of JackBe

May 17th, 2007 was a ‘Google Day’ in Warsaw. I did some recording for you to see:

vid #1 of 4:

vid #2 of 4:

vid #3 of 4:

vid #4 of 4:

On March 1st, 2007 we’ve had a special, unformal ‘innowatorium’ event (unconference) with Yegor “I’m a global guy” Anchishkin. We had a lunch and talked about his business and opportunities on the Ukrainian market. Shortly after I drove Yegor to the airport and we almost had a car accident - too much distraction caused by car-window sightseeing. ;-)

Yegor Anchishkin is a Co-Founder and a Product Manager at Viewdle - a startup that originated from Ukraine but offers its B2B services of video indexing and search to the biggest media corporations. But let’s allow Yegor to speak for himself:

Viewdle is a next-generation video indexing platform that powers private label search engines for TV, online video, and enterprise content. Viewdle was founded by a team of engineers from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Hummingbird (Nasdaq: HUMC) and Jumpcut, who developed a product from idea to a stage where it is considered by Fortune 500 corporations.

The day before during TMT.Ventures’07 Warsaw event Yegor talked about “VC investments in technology prototypes with global market potential” and gave practitioner’s view on strategy and tactics for hi-tech startups to utilize the best from new economies of Eastern Europe.