If you’re running your own business and receiving a majority of your payments via PayPal (or if you make so much money that even a minority is a lot of cash), then you need to know about something called PayPal’s Merchant Rate.

I first learned about this from Andy Kim, who wrote to the macsb mailing list with a link to an article similar to this one, by Nathaniel Brown. The bottom line? If you bring in more than $3000/month via PayPal, then you’re probably getting charged more than you need to for your transactions.

The basic rate for PayPal transactions in the US is 2.9% + $0.30. If you bring in more than $3000/month, that rate goes down to 2.5%, and if you bring in $10,000/month (lucky you!) the rate goes down to 2.2%.

PayPal’s rates are publicly disclosed, and it’s pretty obvious that the rate gets lower as you make more money. So why am I posting this? Why did Nathaniel post about it? Why did Andy send the link out to the mailing list? Because there’s one extremely annoying, extremely important gotcha: you have to ask for the discount in order to get it.

Yep, even if you’re bringing in $95,000/month, earning PayPal thousands in commissions, they will patiently charge you the maximum rate until you go out of your way to apply for your discount. And when you do, it only affects transactions from that point forward.

So if you make more than $3000/month from PayPal, chances are you’ve been getting ripped off for months or years, and don’t know it.

To apply for the discount, follow these “simple” steps:

1. Login to your business PayPal account.
2. Click the “Fees” link at the very bottom of the page.
3. Click the link in the fees schedule that says “1.9%-2.9% + 0.30”.
4. Find and click the link to “Apply” for merchant pricing.

If your experience is like mine, your application will be automatically approved based on your PayPal revenues from the last calendar month. Since the rate you get is determined rather crudely from those revenues, if you expect this month to be much better than last month, then you might wait until next month to make the application.

In any case, if you make more than $3000/month from PayPal, this is a very easy step that will save you $12/month (or much, much more) in fees. Enjoy!

I remember using that “Bounce” command in Mail.app a few times many years ago. My intentions were good: to convince spammers that my email doesn’t exist and they shouldn’t bother. But I always sort of wondered whether it was worth it, and whether I would sufficiently fool the sender that my email address no longer existed, or whether it would just indicate that I was alive and actively looking at spam before bouncing it.

Michael Tsai, developer of SpamSieve, is the man I trust for all things spam. He says bouncing is useless, and may be dangerous. So that settles it.

Speaking of SpamSieve, I should read the manual one of these days. You install it, you train it, and then it basically just works. So it’s easy to forget about it and never bother really exploring all of its features. I recently discovered that SpamSieve logs every decision it makes along with some pretty interesting information about why it made it. So if you ever spot a misjudged spam or ham message, take a look at the log message for some interesting details about why it may have happened. (Then train it so SpamSieve learns how to remedy its error).

PS SpamSieve satellite tool for UNIX servers pretty please. If I could run SpamSieve on the server, and administer the corpus remotely from my Mac, I’d be an extremely happy camper. This would also be a killer feature for many iPhone owners.

Update: Michael is on a tear today with good SpamSieve tips. His note about spam forged from “me” may be inspired by a question I asked him a few days ago, where spam was being automatically let through from one of my many business addresses. Simply adding the address to the “Me” card in Address Book fixed the problem!

Time for another MarsEdit update. This time I’ve addressed some issues with the Text Markup menu. The major change is to add a redundant version of the menu to the Post menu in the menu bar. This will ensure that the shortcuts are available even if you don’t have the toolbar visible in a post window.

If you occasionally find yourself wanting to repeat a particular markup macro, and it doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut of its own, you’ll enjoy the new “Again” markup menu item (inspired by Guy Kawasaki). Just press Cmd-Y to repeat whatever markup macro you last invoked.

Other changes are a bit more subtle, but for some of you will be particularly welcome. Fixes for Blogger and Movable Type users address minor nuisances, and some other minor tweaks that may affect all users.

Complete details:

• Markup Changes
  • “Do Again” item for markup menu – repeats last applied item
  • Add Text Markup menu to main menu (fixes issues with markup macros when toolbar is hidden)
  • Better support for Return, Arrow keys, and F-Keys in markup shortcuts
• List recent dates as relative, e.g. “Yesterday, 3:30 PM”
• Fix false warning of empty categories when only a new category is set
• Add some missing French localized strings
• Don’t bounce icon when editing in external editor
• Movable Type Specific
  • Fix bug causing _1 being appended to slugs
• Blogger Specific
  • Improve formatting display for <br /> tags in Blogger posts

MarsEdit 2.0 has been out for about a month now, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. It’s very gratifying to learn that all the little nuances I thought were important enough to spend time on, are actually being appreciated by tons and tons of users.

First of all I’ve gotten a number of personal notes from people who have either recently discovered or rediscovered the application. I don’t feel comfortable sharing the names of people who have emailed me privately, but some people have taken the liberty of blogging publicly about their decisions. Michael Tsai, editor of About This Particular Macintosh, wrote publicly about his switch to MarsEdit, and it sums up the sentiment nicely:

“For a long time I just didn’t get the point of applications like MarsEdit. I think I understood the arguments for such software, but I didn’t feel a need to actually use it. […] Now I’m hooked. Some things that I thought might be problems ended up being non-issues, and the whole draft-edit-post flow is much smoother than I was expecting.”

The Mac ReviewCast had great things to say about it, declaring it “still the best.” Why, thank you! David Sparks wrote up a text version of his thoughts on the MacSparky blog. I like his assessment of using a web client to manage your blog:

“There really is nothing wrong with that. It is perfectly fine. Of course it is also perfectly fine scrub your floors with a toothbrush and self perform your own dental work. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it is possible.”

Giles Turnbull reviewed MarsEdit 2.0 for Mac User UK, remarking in particular on the value of the Flickr integration:

“This clever combination of local and web-based software working transparently together is what makes MarsEdit so impressive.”

Especially gratifying is the steady stream of comments I receive “off-the-cuff” from users as they buy the product. Around the time I released MarsEdit 2.0, I updated my web store to include a very prominent, easy to use comments field. The comments come directly to my inbox and I get a chance to read them and reply. Most of the comments say something extremely vague yet gratifying, like “I love it!!!” But I’ve also received random song lyrics, poetic quotations, and expressions of affection with unicode glyphs (phew! the unicode support works).

It’s such a relief to not only have MarsEdit 2.0 out there, but to have the public appreciating it. I can tell that by the time 3.0 rolls around there even more users anxiously anticipating the release than there were this time.

Thanks, everybody!

Update: One of the difficulties of a post like this is collecting all the mentions in one place. Well no sooner had I published the post and popped my iPod on than I was treated to another wonderful mention from Leo Laporte on the MacBreak Weekly show:

“The new 2.0 version of MarsEdit has come out, and well, well worth it. […] That’s how I do all my blog posting now, and it’s really increased my output.” (1:09:30)

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. MarsEdit will make you a more prolific blogger. I’ve seen it time and time again. I think it reduces the psychological burden of blogging. I frankly can’t believe Leo is posting so much lately, and I’m really glad that MarsEdit is playing an important role.

Side-note: This episode of MacBreak Weekly is sort of an indie-Mac holy grail episode. Great mentions of Stunt Software’s On The Job, and Rogue Amoeba’s Radioshift, as well!