I have my final call of 2011 in 6 minutes, so I decided to take a break from packing and wish everyone joyous and festive holiday, whatever you celebrate. We’re on hiatus through Jan 8th, but will return full of energy, single malt and ideas.
We didn’t get a tree up this year, so I have no photos of our cats playing tree ornament. So I share with you my friend Joanna’s cat, in his Christmas tree.
One of the challenges anyone doing business on the internet faces is how to provide contact information so that potential customers can reach you in a form that spammers can’t easily abuse. Contact forms are the classic method, but they can (and are) abused by spammers. We decided to try something different. About 2 months ago, we started using rotating contact addresses. Every day a new address is deployed on the contact form on our website. Each address is valid for a fixed period of time, and is then retired.
This seems to be working well for us. Spammers are harvesting the email addresses, but because they are only valid for a fixed period of time, the amount of spam in my mailbox is not overwhelming. I am spending less time searching for sales mails through spam. An interesting side effect is I can actually see who is harvesting addresses and spamming.
It’s not perfect, I’m still getting spam to that address. But it’s spam at a level where I’m not losing real mail.
Over the years I’ve picked up a lot of useful and relevant information about email delivery. I’ve shared a lot of information here on the blog, and while that’s great, a blog is not a great format for a reference. The ISP information page was an initial pass at creating a reference. I realized that just linking to the ISP provided information didn’t communicate very much about how to deliver email even to those ISPs that were explicitly mentioned.
Enter the Word to the Wise Delivery Wiki to fill the need for a publicly accessible reference on email delivery. The cornerstone of the site is the ISP Information page. This page contains summary information about a number of ISPs, including known connection and sending limits. Each ISP mentioned on that page also has a individual page with more detailed information on delivering to that ISP. The information is as accurate as I could make it, and in many cases have been reviewed by representatives of the ISPs.
I welcome contributions from the general community. I will also be continuing to add content. My goal is to have a community resource for people handling email and delivery issues.
I did have the absolute best of intentions to finish the Ugly part of my series on “The Good, The Typical and the Ugly” while on the plane yesterday. But, as things sometimes go, it didn’t happen. Blogging will be light through Jan 4th as I’m actually taking some time to visit family, relax and recharge. When I get back I’ll have a post about the ugly end of senders and ESPs as well as some advice on how to join the ranks of the good. I’m also planning to have some new resources available and announced early in January.
May everyone traveling have safe journeys. Happy Christmas.