With many of the homeowners feeling the pinch of economic depression, loan modification has become one of the most sought-after options to avoid foreclosure. Recently there has been a forum discussion that focuses on an issue, where the lender charges off the second mortgage even after approving modification of the loan.

The poster received a verbal agreement from the second lender for a trial modification plan. He paid the first trial payment on time as per the agreement. But the next month when he pulled his credit report, he found the loan account has been charged off. On contacting the lender, the poster learned that the former had again reinstated the loan. The second lender then asked him to make the next trial payment by Oct. 27, 2009, else he would again charge off the debt.

Following are the questions the poster asked the community:

1.    Does he have any ground against the second mortgage company that charged off the loan even after approving a trial loan modification?

2.    If the lender charges off the debt after Oct. 27, 2009, can the poster still negotiate with the mortgage company for loan modification?

3.    In case the second lender forecloses on the property, will the first cancel negotiations for the modification?

Trial modification plan & mortgage charge-off

It seems the second mortgage company erroneously reported the debt to the bureaus as charged off. It could also be possible that they charged off the debt as they thought they could not recover the balance on the loan. Though the poster paid his first trial payment in good faith, he has no ground against the second lender as there is no written agreement for the loan modification. The second lender is not legally bound to offer modification as the verbal agreement is not legally valid. So, the lender reserves the right to charge off the debt to whoever they want.

(more…)

For security Gmail does not allow you to send files with .exe extension. But if you are sure your exe file is free of viruses and you want to send it then just change the file extension from .exe to .ex

This way gmail will not recognize it as an executable file and will allow you to send it.

Make sure the person you are sending this file changes the back the extension to .exe before launching it.

“I did not get the email and I don’t want to work with your company” can be the most frustrating experience for a customer focused company. It can be even more frustrating for a community oriented group like ours (It can also create communication problems in your personal life, read on to know more). Emails play very significant role for our current web based customer support models (Some may agree, some may not and some may even declare email bankruptcy).

Email problems with Google Apps

Email delivery wasn’t a problem for our technical team. We were handling our mail servers well but the JS based gmail interface (with a Google speed search, filters) forced us to try out Google apps. We liked everything about Google apps except the painful messages by community members about email delivery failure. Ever since we have shifted our mail servers with Google, we found that our outgoing mails were going in spam folders which was bothering us and our community members.

We went through many existing discussions on similar issues but could not get a solution from Google reps. At last after some research our R&D came up with a small fix (After all a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, what a step it was!). R&D team stumbled upon the SPF records for our DNS zone.

SPF a quick start

The Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an open standard specifying a technical method to prevent sender address forgery. Even more precisely, it allows the owner of a domain to specify his mail sending policy, e.g. which mail servers they use to send mail from their domain (In our case it was mortgagefit.com and google servers).
The technology requires two sides to play together:

1. The domain owner publishes this information in an SPF record in the domain’s DNS zone, and when someone else’s mail server receives a message claiming to come from that domain, then
2. The receiving server can check whether the message complies with the domain’s stated policy. If, for e.g., the message comes from an unknown server, it can be considered as a fake.

For more information on Email authentication and SPF record configuration visit http://www.openspf.org/Related_Solutions.

Example, Mortgagefit SPF for Google Apps

After I fixed this problem in MortgageFit, I decided to do this blog post in detail. As I said SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework and is an extension to Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). What SPF does is nothing else but protects your domain from being forged by spammers. Lets understand it in simpler steps:

• Step1: Suppose a spammer forges a mortgagefit.com address (say sam@mortgagefit.com), connects from somewhere other than mortgagefit, say abcxyzspam.com and tries to spam you. Now when he sends the message you see MAIL FROM : sam@mortgagefit.com
• Step 2a: Now if mortgagefit.com does not publishes SPF record, then there is no way to authenticate the email sender.
• Step 2b: Now if mortgagefit.com publishes SPF record, that record will tell your computer how to find out whether the sending machine is allowed to send mail from mortgagefit.com. If mortgagefit.com’s SPF record says that they recognize the computer (IP, Domain) then you can assume that sender is who they say they are, but if that message fails the SPF test then it is forgery and thus you can tell that it is probably a spammer.
• Remember one point, if you are using desktop based application like outlook express or thunderbird then this will not work. Since that application will have the IP of your local ISP provider.

SPF for Google Apps

Google help says,

To set your domain’s SPF record, publish the following TXT record on the DNS resource: v=spf1 include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all

Publishing an SPF record that lacks include:aspmx.googlemail.com or specifying -all instead of ~all may result in delivery problems.

SPF record for MortgageFit hosted with Google Apps

SPF entry for mortgagefit.com says,
v=spf1 a mx include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all

The following table will explain it in detail

	v=spf1	This identifies the TXT record as an SPF string.
	a	mortgagefit.com’s IP address is 207.210.84.76 (hurley.asmallorange.com).That server is allowed to send mail from mortgagefit.com.
	mx	This wizard found 17 names for the MX servers for mortgagefit.com: ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.com, gsmtp83.google.com, gsmtp93.google.com, ug-in-f27.google.com, ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.com, hu-in-f27.google.com, gsmtp167.google.com, gsmtp163.google.com, el-in-f27.google.com, ASPMX4.GOOGLEMAIL.com, gsmtp163-2.google.com, ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.com, ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.com, ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.com, gsmtp215-2.google.com, mu-in-f27.google.com, and ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.com.(A single machine may go by more than one hostname. All of them are shown.)The servers behind those names are allowed to send mail from mortgagefit.com.
	include:aspmx.googlemail.com	Any server allowed to send mail from aspmx.googlemail.com is also allowed to send mail from mortgagefit.com.
	~all	SPF queries that do not match any other mechanism will return “softfail”.Messages that are not sent from an approved server should still be accepted but may be subjected to greater scrutiny.

SPF record creation Wizard

You can create a what SPF record is best suited your domain at http://www.openspf.org/

Future of email authentication

1. IP based authentication will grow weaker.
2. Domain based authentication will stay but still won’t avoid the spammers hat.
3. Email ID based authentication will play a very significant role.

In my opinion, a combination of (2) and (3) will play very significant role. So keep one of your email id as a very active and properly used email id that can be used for important conversation with your customers.

Some of the other Resources

This will help you from stopping your mails from landing into Spam or Bulk folders are mentioned below (the second, third and nth step for perfect email delivery).

1. Sender Score
2. Email certification and accreditation services
3. Email deliverability and reputation services
4. EmailAdvisor by Lyris: Email Legibility and Deliverability Enhancement Tools
5. Email authentication for marketers
6. Email blacklists

[tags]Google, Google Apps, SPF, DNS, E-Mails, Spam, Mails, SPF Record, How to, Emails[/tags]

Loan calculators are very important in day to day life. It allows you to know the exact amount of your loan before you apply for it. At the same time you can also calculate the EMI of your loan. You can also use mortgage loan calculator to determine your mortgage rates. Loan calculators also can also be used for auto loans.

You will find many type of loan calculator on web. While most of them are free to use, some of them are paid. The large benefit of using loan calculators is to compare loan offers.

Loan calculators are also helpful in consolidating or refinancing your debt. These loan calculators can help you setting up your household budget and savings plan.

[tags] loan calculator, mortgage calculator[/tags]

In last few weeks Mortgagefit had a better progress on their tools. Mortgagefit had over 1400 downloads……

What downloads???

Mortgage Planner got around 1400 downloads.

What is mortgage planner????

Mortgage Planner is a combination of 3 calculators which help home buyers to take a right choice on their home or property. It helps to make a decision whether to buy or rent a house. This planning tool helps you to figure out the maximum amount of money that can be borrowed depending on your financial condition. It also helps you to give an estimate amount figure you need to save for making the down payments. All you need to do is download this planning tool and calculate whatever you want to.

What do you think… “Isn’t this an amazing turn around?”

For download click here.

[tags]mortgage planner, mortgage calculator[/tags]

There are some remarkable syndication tools available online, that helps the very cause of your website or blog. One such tool is the Mini Forums. It serves almost the same purpose as forum-based websites do but in a miniature format. This tool helps the users to put their queries & problems by clicking a small Question Box. They can see the answer or replies sent by other online readers just by clicking the Answer Box.

Thus it provides your readers a chance to clarify their doubts quickly.

The forum-based websites would often require the visitors to register prior to posting their queries, while this option is subtle, simple and requires no registration.

And the best thing is that it takes very small space within your site. Just copy and paste a small code that supports this tool & merge it with your blog or website.

So now you can provide your readers a better interactive platform.
[tags] mini forums, web tools, syndication tools [/tags]

[tags] gmail, google mail[/tags]

Google Pack is a free set of essential software from Google and third-party companies. You can browse the web faster, remove viruses, worms, trojans and spyware, organize your photos and many more, through the software available in Google Pack.

Through Google Updater program you can downloads and installs all the software in the Google Pack. It also monitor the status of your installation, run software that’s been installed, or uninstall software. After downloading the program, it will appear in your system tray and notify you when new software is available.

Which software are available in Google Pack?

Google Software

• Google Desktop
• Google Earth
• Google Photos Screensaver
• Google Talk
• Google Toolbar for IE
• Picasa
• Google Video Player (USA only)

Third-party Software

• Skype
• Spyware Doctor Starter Edition
• Adobe Reader 8
• Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar
• Norton Security Scan
• RealPlayer
• StarOffice

Users can choose any of the above programs to install. If the program is already installed, Google Updater checks the latest version of the software and upgrades it, if necessary.

[tags] web tools, google pack, google updater[/tags]

The omnipresence over the clients , functionality has lead to the popularity of the web applications. The technique to upgrade & inform the users about the different web applications without sharing them across the client computers is a vital factor that contributes towards their popularity. Web applications are used to implement E-mails, online shopping, online auction, wikis, web forums, blogs and many other different functions.

Web Applications not only improve your site architecture, it also improves the accessibility your site.

[tags] web applications, web forums[/tags]

When it comes to create & manage syndicated website content, there are number of tools that make it possible. Mortgagefit provides some of the useful Syndication Tools that helps your site or blog to serve their visitors in an enhanced method.

Most of the tools are available at free of cost.

Benefits:

• Get the updated content every minute absolutely free of cost.

• We have redefined our syndication process for better use. Now you have less code to copy.

• Get information of the latest mortgage happenings and the related discussions at one stop.

• These tools will attract your visitors, for that your site’s or blog’s daily traffic will be increased.

• View the most popular & replied discussions and searchable topics in MortgageFit Community.

Types of Syndication Tools:

Question, Discussion and Help - Sign up for discuss your all financial issues and participate in the recent community discussions.

Community Discussion - Get the update of the most recent active community discussions by the community members. You can also get an update of the mostly visited discussions of our community members.

Mortgage Calculator Tools - Here are some calculators to make your mortgage calculation easier and help you to manage your budget.

Get RSS Feeds - Add this tool and get fresh news and latest updates on mortgage rates, articles and community discussions.

[tags] syndication tools, web tools, mortgage calculator, rss feeds[/tags]