LateNiteSoft Recent Activity or, Xslimmer 1.3 is coming soon

It is been a while since the last Xslimmer release. You might be wondering if we are still working on it or not. We are.

You might not have noticed it, but during the last 9 months we have made 35 blacklist releases. With each release, we introduce one or more applications into the blacklist. This is a time consuming process, as we try to test each application blacklist request prior to committing it. Blacklists releases are normally silent, unless a user selects to manually update. Recently, we received a request to add release notes to the blacklist releases. We are considering adding this feature, but would like to do so without disturbing the user too much.

We have been fixing our issues with the email server. Some servers still consider our emails as spam, and having license files as attachments does not help. We did resolve the DNS issues. We need to work on the attachments. That is why we are now remodeling the way the license server works, so we can provide the license files as downloadable links. This will make it easier for everybody and should cause less anti-spam related problems.

We are also actively working in Xslimmer. We are working both on release 1.2.5, which shall introduce some bug-fixes and some functionality changes based on user's requests. In addition, we are working on version 1.3. For this version, we are introducing changes in the UI and some additional functionalities. Moving from a designer's mock-up to a fully functional application is always complex, and requires a lot of attention to detail, but we are getting there. We are expecting to start a small beta test in around 10 days.

I hope this gives you a feeling of what we are up to, but if you have doubts or suggestions, feel free to ask.

Spam, Alternative Email Addresses

Spam. It is ubiquitous. All around. In our case, we even get spam through the contact form of our website. Every single day. The issue is so big that practically all big email providers have added anti-spam measures. This allows users to get less spam, which is great, while still receiving genuine messages. That is normally the case. Unfortunately some providers must have such a big of problem, that at times they reject genuine messages too. What's worse, in some cases those messages don't even get to the user's spam folder.

In our case, we have had problems with customers with addresses from Hotmail/MSN and AOL. Messages to their users sent from our automated system were rejected. This meant that licenses were not getting to their legitimate owners in an automated way, and we had to resend them manually. In some cases, even the manually sent messages failed to reach the final users. So, we had to get Hotmail and AOL account to contact the users whose messages were not reaching them. Not ideal. If you were one of them, our apologies.

After investigation, we found out some of the rules that these providers use to reject email. We made several changes to the DNS configuration, and made several requests to our hosting provider. All these were intended to get our messages through. It seems like it is working fine now. We want to thank all the people who helped us detect this issue and resolve it.

Now, as spam is still going to be among us for a while, if you need to contact us for whatever reason, please provide us with an alternative email address. Particularly, if you buy Xslimmer and do not receive your license after a few minutes. Thank you!