Rob's Blog

I just had a customer contact me asking if I had any idea why his email was being rejected by the Yahoo mailservers (which also deal with all BT addresses).

The rejection message said:

554 Message not allowed – [320] (in reply to end of DATA command)

A quick Google search, and a look at the message that was rejected, told me that the time on the sending machine was wrong – it was set 1 month in the future. It seems Yahoo won’t accept mail sent from the future, so if you are getting similar rejection messages check your system clock!

I hope this helps someone.

Back in February I wrote that the promising service Homepages Friends (formally MySearchFunds) had stopped paying out, (wel, they seemed to have stopped paying me anyway).

Any members will have seen the emails they sent recently. The first one seemed to give you the option of paying your earnings to a charity instead and the second one gave tyhe option of using the earnings to offset your carbon emissions. Neither was very clear about what exactly was happening.

Today I received an email clarifying it. They are going to stop paying users for their searches (as of 1 August), and instead will be donating it to your chosen “cause”.

They do say that any searches made before then will be paid (regardless of whether the threshold is reached), but I’m not sure whether to trust that, given how long I’ve waited for my payout (they owe over £50 now).

They are still due to pay for referrals, but only a flat ratre so it could take a long time to make anything!

I decided to look for an alternative, and came across Scour. They don’t pay as much per search, but you can increase your earnings by reviewing or voting for results. It also aggregates Google, MSN (or Bing) and Yahoo results, and it all looks much slicker than HomepagesFriends (in fact it looks like a nice search engine even without the payment!). Worth a try. Of course it would be great if you used my referral link.

I’d love to hear your comments.

I wrote last Tuesday that My Search Funds (the site that pays you for your web searches) was to become Homepages Friends. This change took place yesterday.

The biggest change is that Yahoo is now used for the searches. I haven’t done enough searches to be able to judge the quality of the results, but I doubt they are as good as Google. I would guess the cashback per search is likely to be similar though.

The other change is to the “personal homepage”. As well as the main search box, there are tabs for “My Gadgets”, “My Shops”, “My Bookmarks” and “My Blog”. None of these are functional yet, but they seem to be aiming at an iGoogle sort of service.

Interestingly, despite them quoting the domain homepagesfriends.com in their logo, the domain they are using is myhpf.co.uk!

Sign up here and take a look, and start earning. I’ve accumulated over £30 so far, and am close to £20 “past 45 days” threshold I need for my first payment!

My Search Funds announced today in an email to their users (or at least me) that they are to become Homepages Friends. It seems they are moving away from just paid searches, to add more cashback services (like their existing eBay cashback).

One downside is that they are moving away from Google to use Yahoo as their search provider. It looks like they are hoping to add more Yahoo services to Homepages Friends in the future. Maybe we will see a service that pays you to check your mail?

The Homepages Friends domain (homepagesfriends.com according to the logo in the email) isn’t active yet, although similar domains redirect to www.whitedotbox.com which seems to be the same organisation and offers search income to sports clubs etc.

They promise changes over the next few days, in the meantime we can get paid to use Google.

I hope this continues to be a good service – I have over £30 accumulated so far!

[Update 2008-06-09:] The changeover has taken place – see my new post.