If you need to privately share any type of file, video, documents, audio or presentations, with a selected number of people, drop.io offers a private file sharing web-based service that is both efficient and dead simple to use.

Sam Lessin and Robin Good – Photo credit: Robin Good

Drop.io is a unique file sharing solution which allows you to upload any kind of file to your own virtual private space (called a “drop“), and then share it easily with your contacts, no matter what device or media they are likely to use. All this is possible without you needing to sign-up, register or login, and with no distracting ads.

100MB per drop at your disposal, hidden from search engines, ready to be shared what you want with whoever you want.

Drop.io allows you to share files from almost any kind of media (phone, email, widgets, Web, etc.) while keeping Google bots and crawlers away from them.

To use it, just go to drop.io, upload your files and set the file sharing permissions. From then on, only the people who have received from you the URL of your drop (and the password when you decide to enforce extra protection) will be able to access your content, and you won’t have to worry about anyone stumbling upon your drop or sneaking into it without your consent.

In this video interview with Sam Lessin, CEO of drop.io, Robin Good tries to explore the key characteristics that make drop.io private media sharing approach so unique in the already very crowded landscape of file sharing applications.

Here all the details:

Intro by Daniele Bazzano

Private File Sharing With drop.io – Video Interview With Sam Lessin

Duration: 8′ 58″

Full English Text Transcription

Why drop.io Is Different From Other File Sharing Services

Robin Good: Hi guys, this is Robin good, and I’m connecting live with Sam Lessin, of drop.io, a file sharing company that just gets out of the main group to provide something that is uniquely different. But I want Sam really to introduce what makes drop.io such a unique type of file sharing service.

Sam? To you!

Sam Lessin: Thanks for having me on.

Drop.io is the easiest way to privately share any sort of media online with exactly whom you want, how you want, for as long as you want.

Using drop.io you can take any file, from video and audio, to documents, upload them to a private URL with no identity, no registration, no search, no social, and then share with exactly whom you want, for how long you want, anything you need from… sharing pictures and video of your family that you don’t want others to have access to, all the way to as a team, or a workgroup, or an organization, where you need to operate on information, and share files.

Create Your Virtual Basket Or “drop“

Robin Good: Fantastic. And it is indeed so. What I have realized myself for the few seconds that I’ve been on drop.io. By the way, d-r-o-p(dot)i-o, drop(dot)io, is not com, is not www something. It’s simple. Just d-r-o-p, is four. I-o is two. That’s six. Six letters in total!

Drop.io: go there, try it, and you can see, the registration fact is very cool. You don’t have to register or login, and you can immediately share.

You’ve got an interesting metaphor for this sharing approach. Do you want to tell us more, because it also relates to your name.

Sam Lessin: Yeah, so drop.io means “drop (dot) input output“. Of course it’s actually the Indian Ocean territory (Internet domain). But we pretend that “(dot)io” is “(dot)input output“.

With drop.io you make drops, which are these little spots that you can share files through.

You can input files by almost anything, from the Web, and widgets, to email, voice, fax. Almost anything you can think of. And then output them from a drop via RSS, email, again basically any output.

Our job and what we try to do, is to allow you take digital content from anywhere, and share it from where it is, to where it needs to be, as simply as possible, if that makes sense.

A drop as a metaphor, is basically all we’re creating is an envelope or media kitchen table, where you can put anything you need in, and then call anything you need out.

Robin Good: These (drops) are some kind of virtual baskets that I can create on demand, and I throw in stuff, and then I say: “I wanted to do to this, this, and this people, but to this guy send it by email, to this guy send it by fax he said, and to this other guy send it on the mobile phone”.

Sam Lessin: Exactly. Whatever you want. Our job is to create the metaphor that is useful for all these types of private share.

Limits and Pricing of Drops

Robin Good: And how large are the baskets? How much stuff can I throw inside?

Sam Lessin: You can make infinite number of drops, each of which is a 100MB by default.

If you want to make your drops bigger, we have very simple pricing plan, where is 10$ per gigabyte per year of capacity. You can put as many files as you want, through that gigabyte, remove files when you’re done with them, whatever you’d like.

It’s a completely flat pricing model. But you can, again, make as many 100MB drops as you want and share it with whomever you want, however you want.

Unique Applications of drop.io

Robin Good: Have you noticed so far… how much time has drop.io been out there for the public to use?

Sam Lessin: We’re almost on our one year anniversary.

When drop.io went live, almost exactly a year ago… and we’ve gotten to the point where every month several hundred thousand of people are using drop.io and there are millions of files with everything from small businesses, to families.

Robin Good: My question is: have you discovered of unique applications of drop.io that you would have never thought of when you were designing and marketing the system?

Sam Lessin: You have no idea. So many!

It’s been one of my favorite things is that simple private sharing, and what we’re enabling, is very broadly useful.

Literally we hear stories everyday of people using drop.io for new exchange things that we hadn’t thought of. There are preachers who are using it to share lectures with their congregants, so when they start the sermon, they turn on the voicemail feature, they record directly to their drop via the phone number and then share the email or RSS with everyone in the community.

There are, believe it or not, we have also met several farmers who use drop.io to option off their farm animals, because they want to share pictures and videos of what their farm animals are, but they don’t want the entire world to see it on Google, or for other competitive farmers who are going to look it up.

That’s one of the fun things about building something new but is very broadly useful, is that people life hack the create their own solutions on top of it. It’s been really fun.

We basically don’t tell people how to use the system at all. We maybe suggest a few things, but it’s really about people realizing that they need to share media privately, and figuring out what they need it for.

Privacy and Controlled Sharing

Robin Good: Good. I have one more curiosity. If I want to share with a great number of people:

1. First: do I have a limit?
2. And second: how do I manage say, put in there a list of people that subscribe to my newsletter to share something with them.

Is that appropriate, the use of drop.io?

Sam Lessin: You can use drop.io for whatever you want. The answer is some of the largest drops have thousands of people who use them everyday.

Actually some podcasters use drops to collect information from their people listeners about what they should talk about.

If you know, Adam Curry runs a popular drop.io page called Daily Source Code. He collects incredible amount of feedback from his listeners every day. You can do that.

In terms of managing subscriptions, as the administrator of a drop you can see who has subscribed to your drop. We don’t ever promote your space, in fact search engines can’t find it, it’s completely off-path.

But if you want to share your space, with whomever you want, however you want, that’s your prerogative. You can do it with as many people as you want.

Adam Curry’s Experience on drop.io

Robin Good: Fantastic. Again, you tell me more about this thing of Adam Curry.

How does it work that people can go on a drop and suggest questions? Can you tell more?

Sam Lessin: Yeah, he sets up a drop. He was one of the very earliest drop.io users, and he’s been very helpful to us thinking about new features. He started using drop.io, he set up a drop called drop.io/dailysourcecode.

He and his listeners can go there, sharing videos, and links, and pictures, and any media that the whole community looks at, that Adam looks at, and then talks about on his podcast. So he uses it as a private file sharing media platform for his show, and it’s really cool to watch how it has grown and how people use it.

Whenever a listener have something they like they just put it up there and then people can interact with it.

It’s like a very open, simple blog in certain ways, the way he uses it.

Advantages of drop.io

Robin Good: What do they see or you see as a key advantage for this type of community in doing this privately rather than having a Ning-based community or a wiki when they put this.

What is the key advantage in making it private? Can you help me see through that?

Sam Lessin: Privacy is a concept, it just means that you share with whom you want.

Adam’s Daily Source Code drop is very large. He shares with probably thousands of people. But it’s not that the privacy in that case I think is the key.

The key is that the the right people know where it is, the wrong people don’t know where it is, and it’s dead simple to use.

You don’t have to sign up, you don’t have to deal with complicated software. Literally if you want to add something you click a button and you add it, and that’s it.

I think that provides a huge benefit for a wide pace of people who just want to share. They don’t want to deal with all these other things that have evolved in social media, they just want move information around. We made it that simple.

Robin Good: I was going to say that from the guys who comes from Sharewood, the forest where you share things, there couldn’t be a better place where to send my friends to. So guys go and share as much as you want at drop(dot)io!

Thank you Sam, and have a great day for today.

Sam Lessin: Thank you so much, talk to you later!

Originally shot and recorded by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and first published on November 11th 2008 as “Private File Sharing With drop.io – Video Interview With CEO Sam Lessin“

Sending out newsletters and having them delivered reliably to your list of subscribers has become a greater challenge than I would have ever thought. Problem is, if you don’t devote yourself to it, everything is set for your newsletter to run into trouble. To not run into such issues you really need to proactively do something about it. The negative consequences are blacklisting of your email and your newsletter filtered out by spam filters on your recipient ISP mail server or on their computers.

Photo credit: Ophelia Cherry

I have seen my own newsletters, which contain no spam at all, beaten down by blacklisting servers and spam filters like they contained radioactive substances. I have also seen thousands if not ten of thousands of email subscribers being lost to these same supposed gatekeepers.

It’s a bloodshed, unless you take some proactive action to prevent this from happening.

Anti-spam filters catch every single email arriving to your inbox before it is actually delivered to it and do a full spam check on it before you can even see it.

Such spam filters use a scoring system to classify an email as a legitimate message or as spam. Some of the most popular among these spam filters, such as SpamAssassin, SpamCombat or SpamProbe are designed to look for specific patterns in your email messages and to assign “spamming points” to them when they encounter such pre-defined patterns. These patterns or spam-signatures may actually include anything from the specific words you use in the Subject line of your newsletter to the actual words inside the text, specific phrases, images, to the format (HTML or text-only) you may have chosen for the delivery of your newsletter, and even to the type of colors you may have used.

Depending on the amount of such “spam” patterns these filters find inside your email newsletter, the spam filter will assign a specific score to it. If your overall spam score goes beyond a preset threshold your newsletter is marked as *spam*, the *SPAM* or *JUNK* word is sometimes pre-fixed to the subject line of your newsletter and then sent to your spam bin automatically.

This is why, one of your main concerns if you are an online publisher sending out an email newsletter is to think well ahead of time about these issues and to do everything possible to avoid falling in such possible email spam filter traps.

Here some personal advice and my selected toolkit on how you can prevent your email newsletter from getting trapped inside spam filters and blacklists:

What To Check To Prevent Your Email Newsletter From Being Filtered, Blacklisted Or Marked As Spam

1) Newsletter Subject Line

Edit carefully your email newsletter subject line. This is one of the most sensitive areas. Watch out what you do here. Some no-nos are words in all caps, the word free, lots of white spaces, name or email of recipients, the use of a date. But there is a lot more. The best way to avoid any risk is to have a professional title that doesn’t use any catchy words.

2) Subject Line Capitalization

Capitalizing word initials or worst, whole words inside an email newsletter subject line is sure to get you in some trouble. Avoid capitalization at all costs and you should have no problems with spam filters.

3) Spam-like Content

Avoid utilizing phrases that may appear as spam-like to email spam filters. Sentences like “Click here!” or “Once in a lifetime opportunity!” or simply exaggerating with too many exclamation points!!!!!! can hit the sensitive triggers of many of the popular email spam filters.

4) Text-Based Is Better

Make it look like text. Email newsletters are generally of one of two kinds. Text-based and HTML-based. If you want to increase the spam safety and accessibility of your newsletter text-based is the safest solution. Even if you choose to go the HTML route, make sure you format and layout your newsletter content “to make it look like” it was in fact a text-based one.

Also: Do not send your HTML-based newsletter without a text-delivery option. If your email newsletter is in HTML and it doesn’t automatically switch to text-format for those readers who can’t receive HTML, it will get filtered out.

5) Attachments

Don’t send attachments. Attachments often carry viruses. In defense, they are frequently filtered out proactively. Even if an attachment gets through to your readers, it is a burden to expect them to run it through a virus protection program.

6) BCC

Avoid using BCC distribution to more than a few recipients. If you use lots and lots of recipients inside your Bcc field it is very likely that your email newsletter will be marked as spam. I would say

7) Color Use

Avoid playing with colored text to get your message across. This is a bad practice from all standpoints as, unless you change background, black remains the most legible color on your screen. Red emphasis is highly connotated with tricky marketing schemes and spam email and also other colors like green or blue should be avoided at all costs. If you want to really hit the nerves of major spam filters change the color of your email background and you are in for “national disappearance day”.

Newsletter File Size

Put some real meat inside your newsletters. The file size of your email newsletter does matter to anti-spam filters. Keep message size between 20K and 50K. This is because the majority of spam emails weight-in most of the time at less than 20K.

9) Bad HTML Code

Make sure you are not creating your newsletter by utilizing bad HTML code generated by popular tools such as Microsoft Word. If you create your newsletter in Microsoft Word to then save it as HTML you should be aware that the code generated by MS Word and other tools may be very “unorthodox” and this is one thing that email spam filters really do not like.

10) Use of Trigger Words

Do not use spam trigger words. SiteSell.com, which offers an online publishing system to would-be online entrepreneurs, provides a free email marketing tool called SpamCheck. In their recommendations, SiteSell experts say that you should strongly avoid using evident spam-trigger words such as “free” inside your email newsletter. Using such spam-trigger words in combination with other trigger words such as “trial”, “quote”, “sample”, “access” can really make your newsletter inaccessible to most anyone who uses a spam filter of some kind.

Subject Line Trigger Words Sheet (PDF)

Words and phrases that trigger spam filters

20 Words That Kill – At Least When It Comes to Spam Filters

11) Images

Do not use images inside your newsletter in place of the text. Some publishers may choose to use a large image to display the contents of the whole newsletter as it may contain lots of visuals and graphics. While the intent is laudable the results may often be nothing to tell your friends about. Avoid using large images like wildfire and stay as text-based and humble of image use as possible.

12) Virus Free

Ensure always that your computer as well as your network are virus free. With laptops coming and going from your LAN, friends hooking in, and open wi-fi connections it is wise to have in place tools and procedures to make sure at all times that the stuff you send out is fully virus- and other malware-free. You certainly want to avoid to inadvertently send out a virus you have on your machine together with your own newsletter and name.

13) Removal

Make sure that your newsletter always includes an easy means for your subscribers to easily remove themselves from your distribution list.

Blacklisting

One key critical element that is often overlooked, is the understanding that the server you are using to send your email newsletters plays a vital role in determining whether or not your newsletter will reach its supposed recipients.

The problem stems from the fact that many of the newsletter delivery services out there, have been used by some spammers or other and therefore such servers have become blacklisted. Imagine therefore what happens when you send your email newsletter through them. Among the top priority things you need to do when you evaluate your newsletter delivery service is to see whether they have been blacklisted.

If you have never heard of the word before, “blacklists” are databases of known spammers that ISPs regularly check.

It is possible to be added to a blacklist without being informed by anyone. It takes simply for a recipient in your email list to mark your email as spam to start a process, which can eventually get you fully blacklisted.

Good Things To Do To Prevent Being Blacklisted

1) Double Opt-In

Use always a double-opt-in method for signing-up your newsletter readers. Any other approach is a recipe for trouble.

A few years ago I was not convinced myself of this and let direct opt-in rule only to lose half of my subscribers in a few months once key mail gateways started blacklisting me because of this practice.

The double opt-in approach simply involves the automatic sending of an e-mail to those who sign-up for your newsletter (after they have opted in at you site) asking them to confirm (via a simple click) that yes, you have permission to send them your newsletter in the future.

2) White-Listing

This is as simple to say as it is hard to get it to have an impact on your readers, but if you are persistent and clear enough in your communication with your subscribers you should positively ask them to add your newsletter “From” email address to their address books or to white-list it. Tell readers on your newsletter sign-up page and in your confirmation email, from what “from” line and domain your emails will be sent. Ask them to add this data to their “safe folder”, address book or whitelist of approved email senders.

Also, you can add a blurb at the very top of your newsletter that reads something like this:

“To ensure you will not lose any of my future updates due to a spam filter error please do add xxxxx@xxxxxxx.com to your address book or “safe-senders” list.”

All of these actions will guarantee that your newsletter will not have to pass through your recipient anti-spam filters.

Last but not least. If you hear from subscribers who are not receiving your newsletter, ask them to look in their spam or junk email folders. If they find your newsletter there, ask them to kindly set-up an automatic filter that takes care of sending your newsletter directly inside their inbox.

Has My Newsletter Been Spam Filtered? How Do I Tell?

An easy way to tell whether your email newsletter has been blacklisted or spam-filtered is to look at your “open rate“. This is a metric, that when provided by your newsletter distribution service, allows you to see how many people are actually opening the email containing your newsletter. The average “opening rate” for an email newsletter is 20% to 30%. If the open rate suddenly drops below your standard levels, you probably have a spam filter problem.

Fast declining number of subscribers. If all of a sudden your email subscribers are dropping instead of increasing, while the quality and content selection fo your newsletter has not changed, you can be sure that spam filters and blacklisting have arrived to your party.

High bounce rate is another relevant indicator. Look through your hard bounces, that is email recipients you have not been to reach and dig into the SMTP replies you have received.

Email Newsletter Spam Checking Tools

Here is the best part of this short guide. Find here below my selection of email newsletter spam-checking tools that you can use immediately, and at zero cost, to verify your next ezine issue.

• Spamcheck by SiteSell

• Content Checker by Lyris

• Spamcheck

• Programmer’s Heaven Spam Checker

• MailingCheck – SpamAssassin Spam Checker software

Some great tips to be found also in these articles:

• Tips for Legitimate Senders to Avoid False Positives

How Spam Filters Think

Originally written by Robin Good for Master New Media and first published on May 24th 2008 as “Spam Checking Tools And Tips To Avoid Your Newsletter Being Filtered, Blacklisted Or Marked As Spam”