'I get no spam' - a quote by John C. Dvorak. He is referring to an email filtering system which offers a highly effective approach to spam detection, offered by Computer Tyme, a small service provider with a website at junkemailfilter.com.

As you can imagine I get many many emails since I not only run this blog but several other sites and domains. A couple of years ago the amount of spam I was receiving got severely out of hand. I was finding myself spending incrasing amounts of time on wading through spam and I was losing time and money. Something had to be done. After trying a lot of approaches including server side blacklists via SpamAssassin as well as client side filtering I gave junkemailfilter.com a try. I haven't looked back since.

What I like about the service is the fact that spam never even touches my mail server, instead it is filtered beforehand. That means I no longer have to download tons of spam emails which get sorted into a junk email folder, which I in turn have to wade through anyway to check for false positives. Junkemailfilter.com acts as a kind of proxy mail server to any domains I add to it, meaning that mail for my sites is delivered to their mail servers where it is filtered and only the good mail is forwarded to me. To make it effective they deploy every anti spam trick in the book, starting with intentionally invalid MX records (spammers often only try the first MX record, then give up if that fails) to 'normal' filters such as SpamAssassin. In fact most spam is rejected right at connect time to the mail server, and overall Junkemailfilter.com has over 99% accuracy.

You can read more about how it works here.

So if you have a problem with spam then drop Marc Perkel at Computer Tyme a note. If you do, or if you are already using his service, then please leave a comment and tell us about your experiences. I'm glad to say that I am in the same camp as John C. Dvorak: I get no spam.

Please find below the presentation that Matthew Kaufman of Adobe gave at MAX North America. It covers the new RTMFP protocol and gives some detailed insights into its capabilities as well as possible future features including the much talked about application-level multicast.

Keep your eyes open for the full video of the presentation on Adobe TV (I am not sure if it will be published there or not, but the video roadmap session is there already).

Adobe has just announced that Stratus is now publicly available for use by developers as a beta service. This is the long awaited missing link that will allow developers to take advantage of the new UDP based RTMFP protocol in Flash Player 10 and AIR 1.5. Why is this important? Well with RTMFP and Stratus, data can now be sent directly client to client allowing for highly cost-effective real-time communication.
In order to use RTMFP, Flash Player endpoints must connect to an RTMFP-capable server, such as the Adobe Stratus service. Stratus is a beta, hosted rendezvous service that aids establishing communications between Flash Player endpoints. Unlike Flash Media Server, Stratus does not support media relay, shared objects, scripting, etc. So by using Stratus, you can only develop applications where Flash Player endpoints are directly communicating with each other.

At MAX this year we also learned that a future (and yet unreleased) version of FMS will also support RTMFP and will be able to facilitate the same endpoint functionality as Stratus. But not only that: this future version of FMS can also use RTMFP in a client-server-client architecture, meaning that any traditional FMS based application can potentially make use of UD based, low latency communications. It does not have to be peer to peer setup... that I think is great news.

In the meantime you can sign up for a Stratus developer key and start playing.

Wowza Media Server Pro is now available under a software subscription licensing model. This offers anyone who wants to stream Flash the most full-featured version of Wowza Pro (Wowza Media Server Pro Unlimited with MPEG-TS) and a risk-free, flexible model for managing their licensing costs according to their customers' streaming demands - it allows Wowza Pro users to add/delete servers as needed and only pay for servers used.

Wowza Pro Software Subscription is an automated monthly license subscription for deployment on users own hardware. It is ideal for service providers (CDNs, streaming services and hosting providers) regardless of their size, but is also a great choice for non-service provider uses. Users can review subscription pricing and subscribe online at here. Pricing starts at $65/server and declines in volume (the first server for the first month is Free with payment of the set-up fee).

The full press release can be found here.

Led by industry guru's Graeme Bull and David Hassoun, this new user group will focus on Flash Media Server technology and solutions. The group will provide a forum of support and education in online video streaming, creation of interactive video experiences, application development and idea exchanges and much more. Access the group now from www.adobe.com/go/fms_usergroup

This group will start as an online user group, and as membership grows, will split into geographical groups that can meet in person on a regular basis. It's all about idea sharing  how to stream video better, how to build more stable media solutions, how to innovate user generated content and social experiences.

Member skills can range from the absolute beginner to the absolute guru. Together, the community will drive new resources and education at all levels and on all subjects related to online video and communication.

The online group will be compose of:
Monthly, online meetings with industry experts and adobe personnel
Discussion Area - ask questions, discuss topics, solve problems
Event Calendar - posting of user group meetings and other pertinent industry events
Reference Library - files, bookmarks, contacts, notes, pictures, and more...
Blog - an RSS feed to pertinent, industry blogs
Job Board - advertise job openings
Media Gallery - share unique video apps

I hope you will join the group. The first meeting is TODAY and to kick off the group and give you an overview of FMS 3.5. Details here.
See you there, I'll try and make it!

MAX Europe turned out to be a great conference and it was really nice to be able to catch up with so many old and new faces. I finally got to meet Fabio Sonnati whose session on H.264 encoding for Flash was packed with technical info and practical advice.
Being my usual lazy self I relied on others to log all the information, and it was of little surprise to me that my friend Tim Siglin did just that. Tim has an excellent summary of Fabio's session over at streamingmedia.com.

The folks at Just-B are running another creative event today under the bTWEEN umbrella called C:Cubed. There's a live webcast running for most of the day courtesy of my friends at Kinura, accompanied by a live chat for users at home and at the venue (I was talking about a similar chat yesterday at my talk at MAX Milan). So why not pop by and check out what's happening?