VEVIDA introduces Mailman to replace EZMLM for your electronic mailing lists. There are a number of reasons why we are switching to Mailman. The most important is that Mailman has excellent administrative options: you can use a simple web interface to set everything up yourself, without the intervention of our customer service. You can also compose your own welcome text. VEVIDA already uses Mailman itself, for example for hosting updates. We have the necessary experience with this program and we can offer you good support with this.

It is very important to us that the development of this software does not come to a standstill. With the introduction of Mailman, we can continue to offer a user-friendly, stable and safe product to manage and send mailings.

For more information about Mailman, please refer to http://list.org. If you have further questions, don’t hesitate to contact our customer service. This can be reached at 050-5492234 (The Netherlands) or 09-2185919 (Belgium). You can also ask questions through MyVEVIDA, which is also where you can place your order.

We hope you enjoy using Mailman!

It has been forbidden to send unsolicited “commercial, charity and/or public service messages” (in other words: advertising) to consumers since 2004, but as of 1 October 2009 this type of unsolicited message may no longer be sent to companies either. This not only concerns business email, but the spam ban also applies to all electronic communication services and networks (including SMS, MMS, fax, messages on social network sites and the like). The old-fashioned paper mail-out is not covered by this ban. This expanded spam ban has already been in place for some time in Belgium and several other European countries, and the Netherlands is now better aligned with the European regulations.

Opt-in

As of 1 October, you may only send emails or faxes if you have received permission for this from the recipient, or if the recipient is an existing customer relation. This permission must be “explicit”. This is also called an “opt-in”, which means that your business relation must actually give permission for such messages to be sent.

Receiving “opt-in” permission can for example be done by having a checkbox checked. In this way someone gives permission by check-marking “yes, I would like to be informed about…”. The checkbox may not be check-marked by default and the description of what the permission is being given for may not be too broad. A sentence such as: “I would like to receive information” is not specific enough. You must develop this further. This can for example be done with a selection menu where someone can choose from the types of information that you wish to send to customers. Attention: this permission may not be hidden in your general conditions, as this is not considered to be “explicit permission”.

As of 1 October, you may no longer send messages to the email addresses for which the explicit permission is missing, as discussed above. If you do this, you risk fines of several tens of thousands of euros from the telecom regulator OPTA.

What is not spam?

A message is not spam if you meet 3 conditions:

• You have explicit permission;
• It is clear who the sender of the message is (identifiable and recognizable; an alias or pseudonym is not enough);
• The recipient can see how and where he can deregister if he no longer wishes to receive messages (preferably as a hyperlink in the message with which the receiver can deregister directly: “opt-out”). Deregistration must be free of charge.

Exception

There are exceptions to the “opt in” rule mentioned above. You may send messages without permission of the recipient if the recipient is an existing customer of yours and therefore has already purchased a product from you. If the customer has given an email address upon making the purchase, you may use this email address for mailings as long as these are about similar products and services. What is understood to be “similar” depends on the circumstances. In this, you must consider the “expectations of the recipient”.

The recipient must clearly be a customer relation. When asking for information or approaching a prospect, this is not yet such a relation because no product and/or service has yet been purchased. In that case, explicit permission is therefore required in advance.
Submit a complaint and more information

For complaints about business spam, you can go to www.spamklacht.nl. For more information or advice about the spam ban, entrepreneurs can go to the website of the Ministry of Economic Affairs. The OPTA can issue warnings and fines to a maximum of 450,000 euros, and answers the frequently asked questions about spam.

You already have a free MySQL database with your hosting package. This is used to store data from free software for websites, such as weblogs (for example WordPress and Joomla) and web shops (osCommerce and ZenChart). In this way, you can use these kinds of tools for your website immediately. Microsoft SQL Server is a good choice for more professional applications.

VEVIDA now introduces Microsoft SQL Server 2008. This latest version of Microsoft’s enterprise database system has many improvements and innovations on the present version, SQL Server 2000. This is especially good news for developers who build modern online applications using Microsoft’s powerful .NET platform.

Improved and innovative
Improved reliability, better performance and fast search results are the most obvious changes. But many functional components have also been expanded: SQL Server now supports native XML, tree structures, user defined types of unlimited size and integrated full text search. The innovative geographical data types (longitude and latitude degrees for earth surfaces and polygons, points and lines for flat surfaces), FileStream data and data types for date and time give developers powerful tools for modern online applications. SQL Server 2008 also introduces transparent encryption and compression of data for improved security, storage and backup. Last but not least, the integration with Visual Studio has also been expanded with advanced tools for development and debugging.
For more information please refer to http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008.

EURid, the registry of .eu-domains, will support so-called IDNs as of 10 December 2009. IDN stands for “Internationalised Domain Names”. For the first time, residents of the European Union can register a .eu-domain with symbols that are not in the “standard” alphabet. Examples of these include the Swedish å, the German ü, the Romanian ş and the full Bulgarian and Greek alphabets.

There is no “sunrise-period” for this introduction, which means that holders of certain rights (trademarks, etc.) do not receive priority. In short: “first come, first served”. In order to help you to register certain IDNs, VEVIDA will submit a pre-registration in November. Although this does not give a 100% guarantee, this reduces the chance that someone else registers “your” IDN to a minimum.

In the coming period we will give more explanation about the ins and outs of IDNs and provide further information about the pre-registration. Keep an eye on our blog!