Yougling Times Blog

This post is some background information to help readers understand how Yougler got to this point.

Yougler was an idea of mine that came to me about 16 months ago. I was having the usual trouble with spam in my mailbox and got to thinking there must be a better way. It just seemed that the Internet has evolved over the years yet email has gone unchanged. I was constantly going through the my spam folder looking for important messages that get tossed in there every now and then. I wanted something other than filters.

Yougler was originally PageMailr. The idea was to simply have a URL with a built in mail forward. A URL is just an address link to a page. The mail forward is a server side script that takes what you input in the form and then sends it to an undisclosed address. Nothing new here except the concept of having a personal mail forward that you can use in most situations and most places, not just the web site where the script is located. This way you can give out your URL without getting spammed.

Automated spam has to be sent an email address; meaning spammers can’t send you anything even if they know your URL. To that, add having to input graphical characters and nothing automated can get through, PERIOD. Only real live people who take the time to type in a message can send you email. So Yougler was originally a system for defeating spam mail without filters.

Now the first place most people search for someTHING is on the Internet yet not for someBODY. Later on it came to me that most people don’t have a searchable presence on the Internet probably because they don’t want to get spammed. This is because if you put an email address on the Internet, email address harvesters will find it and add it to their junk mailing lists and soon your inbox will be clogged with junk mail. So PageMailr seemed to be a great solution to this inability to find most people on the Internet. Why not submit the URLs to search engines? Doing this is what I call “the free people search and white pages project.” This unwieldy name is designed for search engines. I just call it “white pages” for short. PageMailr now made it possible for anyone to find you and your contact page with a simple search. People no longer need to know or keep track of your email address to find you and send you an email.

So now you see what I think is a pretty good idea. My problem has been marketing it with almost no budget. I spent last summer writing the code for PageMailr and I then I launched it in early October. Originally parts of the service were to be subscription based but I dropped that almost immediately when I realized no one was going to pay for it. So I rewrote the site. I then tried advertising it as a spam mail blocker with Google and got users who wanted to use PageMailr as a way to spam people so I reconfigured the site again, removing the ability for users to send out email. Using Google advertising was costing me about $20 per registered user. It was too expensive for what had became a free site.

To make a long story short, I rewrote the site several more times changing its look and feel trying to get users interested. When I added the “white page” feature, I changed the name to Yougler to fit this new application. This was another rewrite and now the code looks pretty confusing.

As I said, I gave up on using Google as a method to get the word out. I tried PRWeb releases and affiliate marketing but neither yielded much bang for the buck. I did many other things too but I won’t mention them here; keeping the post short (Ha!). I didn’t want to do a blog because of the work involved but it seemed the only way left I hadn’t tried. So I launched a blog, “Yougling Times” and in so doing I also realized I could write a Yougler plugin for bloggers to use for spam free communication with their readers.

So that sums it up. The future is what? I don’t know.

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We are more than just alive, we are the Universe aware of itself… so pay attention! –note to myself
Author’s Yougler Profile is at  netlatch–.