As I’ve said time and time again, it’s good to air out all your successes AND failures. And today I’ll be airing out another one of my failures, well more like a mistake. In any case, it’s something that should have been done better.

Yesterday I published the post An Easy Shortcut to Successfully Budget Your Finances. On it I stated a “basic rule” to significantly simplify your budgeting, all the while leaving you with a surplus of money if done right. The rule is sound, but for whatever reason there was a mistake in the translation from my head to my written words (my blog post). It wasn’t a late night post when I was really tired type of mistake, it was written in the middle of the day. It was a classic mistake of my brain saying one thing while my words said another slightly different thing.

Even after re-reading it a few times, it was still perfectly clear in my head. I knew what I meant to say and I had said it. It actually wasn’t until Freewheeler (unfortunately the comment was anonymous) commented on the post that I realized the rules I had written down weren’t exactly what I meant to say. They were close, and I can easily see where I went wrong.

What I wrote was:

Where it should have been:

The good news is that the rules I stated would have been even more in your favor, giving you an even bigger surplus. But it would also have made budgeting much harder.

The biggest mistake was on the income, the first digit shouldn’t have been altered, but it made sense in my head. What I meant to say was round down, but what I instead said was round down and then some.

The good news is that my examples showed what I meant to say. The examples are correct, it’s just that the rules weren’t as accurate as they should have been. Good thing they favored the budgeter.

All that to say I apologize for the mistake in yesterday’s post. And it’s been corrected.

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** Update: The rule below has been updated to reflect a small correction.

Most of us want to budget, we’re just not very good at it. To properly budget means that we need to keep track of all our expenses and all of our income. For most people the income part is simple, it’s the paychecks you get from your job. It’s the expense part that’s difficult because it requires detailed and regular record keeping to be accurate.

Have you ever tried to calculate all your expenses for a month? Generally this involves buying software like Quicken and entering in all your information (as well as downloading all your banking information into the software). Then hopefully at the end of the month the discrepancy between what you entered and what you spent isn’t too big. And have no doubt, there’s always a discrepancy, you always spend more than your budget says somehow. The budget (or software) must obviously be wrong then!

Or could it be that there are lots of cash expenses that just don’t get tracked. Those daily cups of coffee that ad up to $40 a month. Or what about that lunch the other day that was $16? Oh and that popcorn and drink at the theatre last week that cost over $300 after coupons? It all adds up.

So unless your extremely meticulous, which most of us aren’t, your budget will always be underfunded. Or so you might think. But today I’m going to show you a very simple way to minimize this discrepancy, and possibly come out ahead! And best of all, it’s much much simpler and takes almost no effort. The only downside is that it’s not as accurate so you really need to do it right. If you don’t, you can come out behind.

It all comes down to one very basic rule that’s used in software estimations. It’s the rule of padding. However unlike software estimations, we won’t pad as aggressively. The rule is:

* Anything that’s under $10 becomes $10.

Very simple. In other words you downplay how much income you make and you over-estimate how much you spend. This gives you room for error. It also allows you wiggle room for un-budgeted expenses such as going to the coffee shop, the ugly gnome lawn ornament you just had to have.

Let’s look at an example. If you make $1230/month, then you only count it as $1000 revenue a month. If you make $5498/month, then you only count it as $5000. If you make $12,942/month, then you only count it as $10,000. Already we’ve reduced our income by a good amount. That’s already a good padding.

In terms of expenses, an $8 coffee at Starbucks now becomes a $10 coffee. That $1.25 chocolate bar now becomes a $10 chocolate bar. Your $1200/month rent now becomes $2000/month rent. If it’s $825/month, then it now becomes $900. Notice that only the first digit changed in the last two examples. Remember, only the first digit is applied. This is to balance things out and keep everything in scale. If you’re rent is under $1000 then you’re probably dealing with amounts on the scale of hundred of dollars. If it’s over $1000, then you’re probably dealing on a slightly larger scale, in the thousands of dollars. By only looking at the first digit, it allows the padding to be on the right scale for you. To keep going, your car payment of $325/month becomes $400/month. The $175.54 grocery bill becomes a $200 grocery bill. And on it goes.

As you can see, by underestimating how much money you make and overestimating how much money you spend, you give yourself some room to breathe within your budget. You don’t need to be as accurate, you just need to correctly round your numbers. In other words, you’ve just given yourself a margin for error. And as an added bonus, these rounded numbers are also much easier to add up and calculate in your head.

By using just this simple principle of padding I was able to come out ahead financially for years. Every month I had some surplus money. Even today I still actively use this principle on a daily basis! However the main difference now is that I own and run my company (LandlordMax) which has forced me to calculated the detailed numbers at the end of each month. I need this accuracy to report my expenses and income to the government for taxes. When I was an employee, all I needed was an accurate number for my income (taxes), no one ever cared how much I spent. It just didn’t matter. With a company you need to know because you can write off your expenses on your taxes. Otherwise I still use the estimation method for my personal finances.

There you have it. The simplest and easiest shortcut to successfully budget your finances. For every income decrease the first digit by 1 and for every expense increase the first digit by 1. And any amounts under $10 becomes $10.

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[Image courtesy of Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror]

Success is about a lot of things, but without perseverance none of them matter. Being smart really helps, but it doesn’t guarantee success. Many very brilliant people can’t successfully start companies, and many not so brilliant people have runaway successes. Luck can help, but it can’t stay with you forever. You can only be lucky for so long.

Honestly is there any other one single thing that can help you achieve success as consistently as perseverance? NO! Everything else, luck, money, intelligence, can help, but none of them will be as powerful as perseverance.

Learning to be successful takes time, effort, and energy. It’s the ability to keep on going through thick and thin. It’s the ability to not abandon when most other people would. It’s the ability to learn from your mistakes and continually improve. Or to use my favorite quote from Eddie Cantor “It takes 20 years to make an overnight success.”. I couldn’t agree more.

A great example of overcoming perseverance comes from the company Harmonix, makers of the wildly successful and famous video game Guitar Heroes. It took Harmonix 10 full years of development and improvements to build this series of games and achieve success. The graph at the top of this post really shows you the perseverance the folks at Harmonix had to keep pushing on. Sure they had revenues, but they also had negative profits. It would have been very easy to quit, but they kept on pushing.

If you ask most people today about the Guitar Heroes series, they’ve only learned about it in the last while with the release of Guitar Heroes 2. That’s when it really started to get some traction. And recently with Guitar Heroes 3 and Rock Band going mainstream, just about everyone knows about them. How many of you played, seen, or even heard of the original Guitar Heroes (version 1) game? By the way, did you know Harmonix is also the maker of the game series Dance Dance Revolution.

As a side note, Harmonix developed Guitar Heroes 2 for RedOctane, but not the latest Guitar Heroes 3 game. Without getting into the details, Harmonix was acquired by MTV in 2006, and as part of its first project it developed the other major competing game to Guitar Heroes 3 called Rock Band (Guitar Heroes 3 was developed for RedOctane by another company). Rock Band of course became a large success. A major part of their success with Rock Band was because of all the knowledge they had acquired over their years learning how to build Guitar Heroes, Dance Dance Revolutions, and so on. In other words, because of their perseverance. Perseverance really pays off!

I’ll give you another great example, my own company LandlordMax. If you look at the graph just above, it’s a 12 month moving average of our sales revenues (with the first 12 months missing to be able to get the first average). As you can see, we had almost no growth in 2005 according to this graph. Although I could’ve sworn we did, it tells me otherwise (a moving average graph acts as a way to smoothen the data points).

In other words, it basically took us two years to really get LandlordMax going. Sure it’s not nearly as long as ten years for Harmonix, but how many of you would keep at it for 2 years before seeing any significant growth? That’s with 3 major version releases (not counting the initial 1.00 release).

Perseverance is the key to success! It took us a while to get the “right” features into LandlordMax, to fully understand what our users really wanted. It took Harmonix many years to get the “right” music software, the “right” polish. Once they understood it though, it didn’t take them very long at all to create another completely new game (Rock Band) and achieve the same success with it. Learning how to succeed takes time and perseverance. It takes commitment and effort.

As the movie Run Fatboy Run asks, what will you do when you hit the “wall”? Will you push through it or give up and go home?

PS: If you haven’t already read it, I recommend reading Jeff’s somewhat related post Living the Dream: Rock Band. It’s about the importance of putting the user’s goals at the forefront of your business. And it’s also the inspiration that initiated this post.

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Normally in the past I’ve posted updates about what we’re doing here at LandlordMax (as well as my other projects) every six months to a year. Well I’m now going to try to increase that frequency to every 2-3 months. I’m doing this because it forces me to look more frequently at our successes and failures in detail. I always do some checks each month, but by forcing myself to post about the more interesting metrics on a regular basis will force me to look deeper into these metrics. Hopefully finding some great nuggets of information along the way.

Firstly, the most exciting and good news is our traffic metrics at LandlordMax. Our traffic, as measured in by unique visitors, has increased by a whopping of 108% in the last 6 months!! That’s our biggest success as it is translating into more sales.

As well our revenue growth is continuing to be very positive, which is great to see. For those of you who are fairly new here, in early April I posted a graph of our sales revenues over the last few years. In that graph there was somewhat of a spike in 2008. I’m glad to report it wasn’t just a one-off spike for January and February, it’s a consistent growth in revenue. May is already looking like another very big month, possibly the biggest yet!

I decided to also push the data further and generate a moving average graph using a 12 month trailing period (which is why the first 12 months are missing from this graph). I have to admit I was surprised with the results, it’s much better than I expected! As you can see below, we’re definitely moving in the right direction. The real estate bust is not hampering our growth, so it’s not all bad news out there. It’s definitely not all doom and gloom for everyone as you can clearly see.

Some other interesting news, FollowSteph is still growing at a very good pace. In the last 6 months the traffic on this blog has grown by 46% which is great. Although I was hoping to more than double it every 6 months, I can’t complain with this growth rate. The good news is that the RSS feed subscription rate has grown much faster than that, it’s pretty doubled in the same amount of time.

As for the book Interview the Pros: What does it take to create a Successful Blog?, it’s still being edited by my publisher. These things take time, which I have to admit is excruiating for me. I like to have things moving, I’m not a big fan of waiting. But the good news is that the book already has it’s own official ISBN number assigned to it. And most of the book’s cover and back copy is ready to go. It’s going to be available in both as a soft and hard cover book. I’ll let you all know as soon as the editing phase is done, which hopefully will be sooner than later. As well I have to finish the website for the book pretty soon, so I can start to do some pre-marketing. I’ll let you all know when the website is available.

As for the ebook I wrote How to Generate Traffic to Your Website it’s done fairly well overall. I have to admit I was hoping for better results, but this topic seems to be saturated with lower quality ebooks. In other words a lot of people are suspicious of all books on this topic because of some bad experiences, so you really have to push hard to make the sale which isn’t really where I want to be (I don’t want to compete with the long spammy sales letters). However what’s been really interested is that ALL the reviews it’s gotten have been favorable! And each time a review came out there was definitely a spike in sales. But between reviews it’s pretty quiet. So I’m looking into what are my options for the future of this ebook…

Otherwise everything else is moving along very well. The biggest item is that we’re always working very hard on releasing the next major version of LandlordMax as soon as possible, which is coming together very nicely. Just extremely busy as usual.

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I broke one of my own golden rules last night, never ever release or publish anything late at night when you’re tired. If you do the odds of making a mistake greatly increase. And unfortunately last night I broke this rule and a mistake did happen. Luckily for me the mistake was minor, but it helped to reinforce what I should have already known.

You see I published my latest blog entry How Much is it Worth to You? after midnight last night. Although I often stay up much later than midnight, I’ve been going to bed earlier in the last while to catch up on some much needed sleep. In any case, the issue is that I was tired and it was late for me that particular night. Normally in these cases I still go ahead and “publish” the article, but I set the “publish time” to be sometime the next day.

I do this because of several reasons, the biggest reason being that I’ll have had some time to rest and be more awake before it gets publicly released. In some cases I’ve had the time to rethink parts of my post and add more information, sometimes adjust the example, and so on. But overall it’s prevented me a few times from making silly and stupid mistakes.

Well last night I went ahead and pushed the publish button, deciding that I’d break my own golden rule just this one time. And this was my mistake!

Some of you might have noticed it, but I think I caught it before most of you did. What happened is that when I wrote the article I initially left the headline blank. I often do this because I couldn’t think of a good headline at the time I wrote the article. In these cases I just continue writing and come back to the headline later.

Last night I forgot to come back later and write my blog post headline. I left it blank. Above the title being blank, it also meant that my RSS feed subject line was blank. No so bad for a starting blog, but as you get bigger it will be noticed by more and more people. Like I said before, this was not a major issue, but it definitely brought the point of my golden rule home. Plus it’s better to fall and learn (or in this case re-learn) from smaller mistakes than from your larger mistakes.

And don’t think this doesn’t happen to large companies releasing major new versions of their software. To give you an example, early on in my programming career, long before I started LandlordMax, at least 10-15 years ago, I worked for a company where a short workday was 12 hours. And that included weekends (this alone has the makings of a DailyWTF written all over it). As you can imagine we were living in a perpetually tired state. Come release time there was even more pressure to work harder and longer hours. And I did, after all this was very early in my career and I didn’t know any better.

Well the obvious happened. Something eventually went wrong one day. Although I can’t remember the details any more, it’s all a big blur, but I do remember one major release that we’d been working particularly hard to get out the door. We’re talking barely enough time to go home to shower and eat at night (or should I say the wee hours of the morning), never mind sleep. Well eventually we made a mistake, and it was a bigger one. On release night, after what we thought was exhaustive coding and testing, we felt like the current release candidate was ready to go. We decided to release it. We were done. Phew. So we performed one last final build to run one last final test round on (remember this is a time before automated tests were mainstream). And we released it. Exhausted we all went home to catch a few hours of sleep.

Unfortunately within a few hours we were all called right back into the office. Our released version had a major bug. I wish I could remember what it was exactly, but I can’t. To be honest I suspect my brain has intentionally forgotten about it. In any case it was broken and customers were complaining. All hell was breaking loose.

Being already tired really didn’t help to resolve this issue quickly. But lady luck was on our side because it was a very simple mistake and we were able to fix it very quickly (I think it was something like the wrong language properties file was being picked up in the wrong build). So simple a mistake that had we released it in a waken state, well even in a just non-exhausted state, it would never have happened. As soon as we re-released it the phones stopped ringing and we were able to finally get some sleep.

Never ever release when you’re tired. But more importantly, had the issue been a complex or hard one to resolve we would have been in a lot of trouble. Having your development team completely exhausted trying to fix a critical and complex bug during a firestorm is an incredibly dumb place to put yourself into. Would you want to have triple heart by-bass surgery performed on you while you were in the middle of a heart attack by a surgeon who had slept only a few hours in the last week and was living completely on caffeine? Especially when there’s no need for it to be like this.

You can’t win every time, but stack the odds in your favor! Be smart about it. Don’t make my mistake. And you can be sure I won’t break this golden rule again, at least not for a very very long time.

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Today as I was going through my RSS feeds I came across a very interesting post on I Will Teach You to be Rich by Ramit Sethi, which coincidently is one of the bloggers I interviewed for my upcoming book Interview the Pros: What does it take to create a successful blog?.

Although the title of his post drew me in (Why the lady sitting next to me should pay $2,000 for a computer class), what really caught my attention was:

If you take a $2,000 computer class and it lets you get a job with a $10,000 salary bump, you should do it. No question.

If you buy one book per week, for $20 each, that’s $1,000 per year. If you get one good idea per week, my friend Paul told me, it’s worth it. If you apply that idea, I can’t even guess how much it would be worth.

I especially like the second paragraph. I’m a very strong believer in reading books (and GOOD blogs for that matter - where good means it has value to you). As a personal goal I try to read one book a week, but I suspect it’s closer to one book every 1-3 weeks. In any case, I’ve found that I can average out at least one great idea per book, generally much more. Not all books are equal of course, some books offer incredible value whereas others are pretty much useless. However as an average I find the ROI for books to be very high which is why I continue to buy them. For example today I just bought a new book, albeit a technical one, called GWT in Action: Easy Ajax with the Google Web Toolkit.

Anyways getting back to the topic at hand, as Ramit says:

Of course, the excuses will come. I don’t have that kind of money. (Answer: Save up.) How do I know if the class will get me that better job? I could probably take the same class for $100 somewhere else. All this stuff is free online, anyway.

I couldn’t have said it better. And I especially like Ramit’s last example excuse: “All this stuff is free online”. I absolutely unequivocally agree, you can get information for just about anything online for free, assuming your time is worth nothing. Not only that, the net is full of misinformation, which can cost you much more than free!

But let’s get back to this free thing. How long do you think it will take you to find all the information you want? It definitely will take you a lot longer than reading a book. Above this, will it all be fluid and coherent. That is, will the material flow and make sense or will you be struggling and fighting with the material to make sense of it all because it will come in pieces that you have to combine together, all fragmented from different online sources.

How much is your time worth? $20? $30? I honestly would rather spend the few bucks it takes to get all the material combined and nicely packaged into a book than spend days and weeks just trying to bring it all together, piece out what’s what, what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s obsolete, what’s duplicated, etc. The ROI of a book is generally worth it!

If I compare the amount of effort I spent to get my ebook on how to generate traffic to your website, well I can guarantee you that even if you make minimum wage the ROI will be positive. It took me weeks to months to put it all together, and that’s not counting the time it took for me to become knowledgeable on this topic. I can’t imagine someone starting from scratch.

Or what about my upcoming book on how to blog? I’ve spent over 500 hours just interviewing 40 bloggers and putting it all together in a book. And above that it’s being professionally edited right now. Sure you could probably dig through these bloggers blogs to find most (most, but not all) of the information they gave in their interviews, but how long would it take you?

And that’s the key to success; look for opportunities that will bring you more value than what you paid for them. This includes everything and anything: books, courses, conferences, etc. As Ramit put it himself, they key to success is “if the value exceeds the cost, do it.” It’s as plain and simple as that!

**Update: It recently came to my attention that the original idea for this post came from a lunch time conversation between Paul Singh and Ramit Sethi. If you also want to see Paul’s take on this idea you can find his post titled The Best Way to Spend $20, Today at Results Junkies.

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Earlier this month there was a thread on Joel Spolsky’s BoS (Business of Software) discussion forum asking What would it cost to build this site. Of course it started innocently enough, with a simple statement:

We recently created a startup on which the website is an integral part. Customers rent our product for a specified time period. When you get right down to it, the required features of the website are no different than what would be required of a car rental web site.

Then came the big question:

My question is, what would a ballpark estimate of the cost be?? Again, the fully functional site would resemble a car rental company such as Hertz.com

This is a completely loaded question!!! There will of course be very large price fluctuations amongst the responses no matter who you ask, these requirements are too broad and open-ended. Sadly however I believe that none of them are near the “real” cost to build this website. I think the highest was around $150k if I remember correctly, with many saying that it could cost as little as a few thousand.

WHAT???

Honestly, to create a car rental service just like Hertz will cost a lot more than $150k. Thinking it will only cost a few thousand is insane. Sure you can say you will outsource it for a few thousand, but I can guarantee you what will come back won’t be what you expect. The price has to be reasonable. If it only cost a few thousand to successfully build this system, than all software, and I mean ALL software, would be outsourced. This isn’t the case. I have no doubt it cost Hertz a lot more.

It’s simple to over simplify how much effort is required to build a software application. So much so that the original poster chimes back in with:

There is just no way this would bet done under $10,000. As I said, the site is about 30 percent of what it needs to do. 5,000 lines of code, couple hundred manhours. The manhours are high as we constantly were changing things. But things are a bit more static now and it would be easier to write a detailed spec for he the remaining requirements.

Some additional “Major” components:

Security/Logins. Certain Admin people will be able to do everything. Lower levels will have limited capabilities.

Audit trails for all changes by personnel. If someone changes a record or changes a reservation it needs to be logged.

RealTime Inventory Management. If inventory is low at certain times then site needs to prevent reservations from taking place. Also ensure inventory was the right stuff when it is returned.

Again, think rental car website. I was thinking more along the lines of $50K to $150K.

Just reading these specs I can very quickly see this site greatly increasing in complexity and scope as the details are filled in. Never mind that the scale of users or data hasn’t even been taken into consideration. In any case, I personally don’t believe that this is possible for $150k, it way too optimistic. The vast majority of the posters are thinking of the simplest solution, but I can already see from this slightly “enhanced” description that it’s not going to be the simplest solution. The requirements are only going to grow, and grow fast they will, otherwise known as scope creep in the software industry.

But alas not everyone agrees. Further down someone comments:

I dunno ’bout 100K. My devs do quite a bit of these sites in the $20K to $50K range … but we don’t have a tight enough spec yet do we? Could (maybe) hit the 6 figures once the full spec is known. The folks suggesting a couple of grand, though, they’re smokin’ crack.

Even though this person agrees that building it for a few thousand is too cheap, he still suggests a price that’s way too low. I have no doubt it cost Hertz much much more. I agree that a simple car rental system could be built for around $100k, but that’s a SIMPLE AND MINIMALISTIC car rental system and NOT a replication of a full blown car system as is suggested. Audit trails, realtime inventory management linked to reservation system, reservation system, scheduling, etc. And these are just listed as “SOME” additional “MAJOR” components. This is not a simplistic system. It will grow in scale very quickly. Just look at some of the questions and issues that came up when we decided to add “simple” email to LandlordMax. And that’s just simple email!

So what’s going to happen. The person will eventually settle on someone who says they can build it for around what they think is reasonable. The delivered system either will not work at all, it will be severely delayed, or it will be severeled scaled back in terms of features and modules. Not only that, but assuming something is delivered, I doubt that it could scale up in terms of traffic load. At least not at that price, scalability takes skill and experience, not to mention effort.

And I haven’t even talked about bug fixing! What do you think happens when a software project can’t possibly be delivered within it’s deadline? Depending on how ethical your company, they might just deliver it in an unstable state where “fixes” will be added to the cost of the project after delivery. For example some software consulting firms are know to do this, deliver a project “on time” only to have the “support” costs be higher than the initial project costs. This way they can be the lowest bidder but yet still charge the real cost of implementing the software. And don’t think it doesn’t happen, it’s much more prevalent than you might think.

Software takes time and effort to build. It’s not that simple yet people continue to grossly underestimate the cost of development and wonder why things it’s late, why it’s buggy, why it just doesn’t work. The answer is simple, extremely simple, many many software projects grossly underestimate the amount of effort required. Although many people want to believe it’s more complex than that, it’s really just as plain and simple as that.

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Yesterday I released a sample (the first 21 pages) of the EBook I’m selling “How to Generate Traffic for Your Website“. In it you’ll find the complete and detailed Table of Contents, as well as the beginning of the first chapter (SEO - Search Engine Optimization).

Like I keep saying over and over here on this blog, you need to try different things to see what works. If you don’t try you won’t ever know. For LandlordMax we offer a free 30-day trial, so why not with an EBook? Except instead of a time based trial, you get the beginning of the book. In this case you can read the first 21 pages before you decide on buying it.

Something else to mention, I’ve had some people approach me expecting the book to be an advanced book about online traffic generation. This book is targeted for people who have just started to those that have an intermediate level of skill and knowledge on traffic generation. It will give you a really solid foundation on which to build. To quote Bob Walsh from 47Hats.com:

“As someone who knows a fair bit about these topics, I found Steph’s down to earth - here’s-what-you-want-to-do-and-why - presentation very complete. His chapters on SEO, AdWords and press releases were some of the best material from a microISV’s point of view I’ve seen to date. Steph pulls from both the experience of his microISV - LandlordMax - and other sources to illustrate and illuminate his points.”

If you haven’t already checked it out, you can read the first 21 pages of the ebook here. And if you’ve already read the sample and want to get the rest, you can buy it here.

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Bob Walsh recently gave a very positive review of my latest EBook How to Generate Traffic to Your Website on his blog 47Hats.com. To quote his blog post title “An Excellent Ebook for MicroISVs”

The following is an exert from his review:

“As someone who knows a fair bit about these topics, I found Steph’s down to earth - here’s-what-you-want-to-do-and-why - presentation very complete. His chapters on SEO, AdWords and press releases were some of the best material from a microISV’s point of view I’ve seen to date. Steph pulls from both the experience of his microISV - LandlordMax - and other sources to illustrate and illuminate his points.

The SEO chapter in particular is must reading for any microISV because it focuses on techniques that work today - not 5 years ago - and because it gives you for the time invested a solid set of strategies to start acting on now. MicroISVs seldom have the luxury to dive to the bottom of any of the many subjects we have to deal with.”

You can read Bob’s full review here. Thank you Bob for the great review!

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About a year and a half ago I was getting really frustrated with the levels of spam my personal emails were receiving so I wrote a blog post asking what others were doing to reduce their email spam. Someone suggested SpamBayes, a free open source solution, which worked great for a while but then I had some issues with it. This eventually lead me to InBoxer, which is basically a commercial version of SpamBayes.

Over the last year or so it’s been amazing! It uses Bayesian spam filtering, so it took a bit to get it fully going. But once up and running things were great. Unfortunately, last week for some strange reason the database corrupted itself. Who knows why but it was frustrating. My greatest fear was that as I was launching my new EBook I’d be in the middle of training the Bayesian spam filter. I couldn’t ask for worse timing!!! In the middle of promoting the ebook I’d have to look at every single email as the spam filters wouldn’t be trained enough yet.

The good news though is that because of the volume of emails I get I was able to train the spam filter to a good enough level before the ebook launch. It has slowed me down a bit, but not nearly as much as I expected. And it’s reminded me of the appreciation I originally had for InBoxer when I first got it. For $40 it’s well worth it! 

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