The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that in a recent move Boston College has stopped offering incoming students mandatory email accounts. The move was due to the fact that many incoming students already have an email account elsewhere. So instead, BC will offer an email forwarding service.

If incoming student John Doe already has an email address at GMAIL, the forwarding service will pass along the email to the student's private account. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it will forward to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Here's a screenshot of a qpsmtpd processes on one of the servers. It was actually a few weeks ago but didn't get around to posting it until now. It looks like all the Yahoo contacting servers went out of control for a couple of hours on that morning.

This screenshot shows that Yahoo was contacting one of our servers more than 20 times at this particular moment. You'd see this in the past, but now servers that act this way are usually blocked or blacklisted because it's doubtful that the sending servers have anything worth while to say and is most certainly spam. Accordingly, I never found out as the message never reached anyone's inbox. I suppose the spam filters were doing their job.

I read a twitter post about a new IDE for PHP. I thought "What the heck is an IDE?" Now, you can blame me for being ignorant or not paying enough attention in class but with more acronyms than I can shake a stick at, I easily get lost in the sea of alphabet soup.

An IDE stands for an Integrated Development Environment. Basically, tools that help people like us develop. "Ooh," I thought, "I already have one of those." So I thought I'd post my personal preferences. Add a comment

We hate spam. We spend countless hours trying to minimize spam and do everything we can to prevent it. We prevent it by forcing mail to jump through a number of hoops that we have setup. Here's a diagram to the left. 

As you can see there are many hoops we force the mail through.

ANSWER

So what's the answer? The truth is an independent broker needs a customized solution. Just as every local real estate market is different, so are the solutions that are needed to serve them.

The problem is a customized solution needs good people and costs good money. It also requires good time. All of which no independent real estate broker has by itself.

INTRODUCTION

1000Watt recently released a report where they select the Top Ten Real Estate Brokerage Web sites in America. Naturally I read the read the report as I watch closely what happens across the country when it comes to Real Estate and Web sites.