Update: Mississippi turned four turnovers into 10 points and won a defensive battle 10-3

While Tucows is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, we maintain an office in Starkville, Mississippi that handles (among other things) everything related to our Platypus Billing Service. Starkville is the home of Mississippi State University and we’re fortunate to have number of Mississippi State grads on staff at Tucows.

This year, the Mississippi State Bulldogs have been playing some excellent football. They racked up a couple of big wins on their way to a 7-5 record and the team was rewarded with an appearance in the Liberty Bowl in Memphis, Tennessee where they’ll take on Central Florida.

From all accounts, the Starkville crew are rabid Mississippi State fans. At the last ISPCON, Grant, our Product Manager, Billing Services, told us all about their extensive tailgating activities. They’ll no doubt be gathered around the TV on Saturday. Up here in Toronto, we’ll all be cheering on the Bulldogs as well.

TV coverage will be provided by ESPNHD in the U.S., while Canadian viewers can tune into The Score for coverage. Game time is 4:30PM ET (3:30pm CT in Memphis, TN) on Saturday, December 29th.

Here in Toronto, there’s a chill in the air and snow on the ground, which means that the holidays are looming. But before we go off and eat holiday treats and ring in the new year, we have some reduced office hours to tell you about.

The table below lists the department along with any special holiday hours.

We’d all like to wish you a very safe and happy holiday season and best wishes for a prosperous new year!

Thanks to Kayla Fleming for the festive squishycow picture!

Department	Dates and Hours
OpenSRS Support	December 25, 26, January 1: 9:00am - 5:00pm (EST)
Hosted Email Support	Regular hours
Platypus Support	December 25, 26, January 1: Closed December 24, 27, 28, 31: 9:00am - 5:00pm (EST)
Payments	December 25, January 1: Closed December 24, December 26 - 31: minimum staffing
Compliance	December 24 - January 1: Closed

We know online identity for your business or yourself starts with a domain name, but what if you have the perfect name and can’t get a domain to match? Most single English word domain names are registered already, so it can take some serious thought to come up with something that sticks and is available. Scott over at HalfAgain Internet marketing has some tips and suggestions for you if you’re looking for that perfect name. He starts with domain availability:

Domain availability is possibly the biggest hang-up to ever happen to naming. Sure, you can come up with great potential names, but can you come up with great potential domains that are available? I won’t spend much time on this because it’s pretty simple. If you’re creating a name for a product or business that will require a .com, be patient, keep trying and you’ll start to get a feel for names that are more likely to be available than others.

The problem is that many domain search tools give a yes or no answer when you query a domain. If you happen to type in a name that is free, you pass through the gates to registration but if not, you’re stopped in your tracks. It doesn’t need to be frustrating if you use the right domain registration service.

Tucows has a couple of domain search tools that help people find quality domain names. The first is name suggestion. Our resellers provide ideas for other names based on the terms you enter in domain name search box.

Really good .com names are getting scarce. Tucows offers access to hundreds of thousands of high-quality domain names that are already owned but available for a one-time fee. These are offered in our Premium Domains service. If you’re a rocker who wants heavymetal.com, you’re S.O.L. But, heavymetalalbums.com is available in our Premium Domains service.

Tucows domain resellers have free access to Name Suggestion and our Premium Domains service. Try it out for yourself, and happy naming. Oh, and last week Adam Eisner gave a reseller webinar about our domain search tools, the video archive of that presentation is available here.

In February we made a decision to nuke the portal for our Email Defense Service and move to filtering only for the time being. Back then, we promised to build a new and improved service to replace it. We’re pretty close to being ready, (it’s in QA now). It’s expected that we’ll go live with it in the first couple of weeks of January, after the holiday and our December code-freeze.

We took a look at Email Defense as it functioned back in February and decided to re-focus on simplicity. Making our services easier to use and administer is a mantra around here these days. The original “spam portal” had every bell and whistle imaginable, but just like lots of other web services and software packages, it was over-engineered. In reality, very few of those features were actually being used. Here’s what we found:

• End Users only used the quarantine, and the blocked/sender lists
• 95% of Resellers used the default settings
• Fewer than 5% of Resellers branded the portal for their end users

Based on these findings and what we learned last winter, we concentrated on delivering the features people actually use.

We created a new spam quarantine that has two main functions:

1. Reviewing spam and, if required, releasing email from the quarantine
2. Managing safe and blocked sender lists

For Reseller management, the service has been integrated into the interfaces for the Tucows Email Service. At the domain and user level, Resellers can set up domain level blocked/safe sender lists, and even reject spam outright, if they choose. If Resellers choose to use the Tucows Email Service as well, filtering only accounts can be instantly upgraded to a full mailbox through the same interface with the check of a box.

We’ll provide more details about the specific changes and time frames in the new year.

In the meantime, here is a preview of what the spam quarantine will look like to your end users (click any of the images for a full sized view):

The list view shows all the messages caught in the Spam Quarantine:

In the message view, users will be able to see each spam message and take one of three different actions: tag the message as “Not Spam” (message is released from quarantine); add the sender to the Safe Sender list (messages from that sender will no longer be filtered) or add the sender to Block Sender list (messages from that sender will be automatically deleted):

Users can manage their Safe and Block Sender lists easily with the push of a button:

Squishycow photos continue to pile up on Flickr. This week we’re featuring the work of Kayla Fleming who posted a couple of really nice shots of our friend around the offices at the hosting company where she works. I’ll admit to being somewhat jealous - Orlando looks nice and warm, while here in Toronto we’re already fighting through snow and ice.

We’ll be showcasing more squishycow photos over the coming weeks. If you’d like to see your shots on our blog, add your photos to Flickr with the tag squishycow and then add the photo to the group, Squishycows in the wild. We’ll post a new photo every week or so and link to your photostream.

What: Domains Search and Sell web seminar When: Thursday, December 6, 2007 at 1:00 p.m. ET

Tucows resellers are invited to join Adam Eisner, Product Manager, Domains as he explains how you can increase your domain name sales by rethinking the domain search process. Adam will demonstrate how using tools like name suggestion and Premium Domains offer better, more relevant search results that lead to more domain name sales. Adam will also discuss Tucows’ Parked Pages and Expired Domains programs - two easy ways for you to make money without lifting a finger.

This 30-minute web seminar, exclusive to Tucows resellers, will take you on an interactive, guided tour of the innovative tools you should be using to provide your customers with the best possible domain purchasing experience.

Click here to register.