Confusing the engineers

We went camping last weekend with a bunch of friends. Had a great time relaxing on the banks of the Tuolumne River, eating way too much and visiting.
On Saturday I was wearing a somewhat geeky t-shirt. It said 554: abort mission. (Thank you MessageSystems). At some point on Saturday every engineer came up to me, read my shirt and then looked at me and said “That’s not HTTP.”
That lead to various discussions about how their junior engineers don’t actually know SMTP at all. Why? Because the SMTP libraries just work. Apparently the HTTP libraries aren’t that great, so folks have to learn more about HTTP to troubleshoot and use them.
I’m sure there’s a joke in there somewhere: A Kindle engineer, an Android engineer and a robot engineer walk into a campsite…
EmailFilters_boxes_forblogIt did leave me thinking, though, about how it’s not that easy to run your own mail server these days. Gone are the days when running your own server was cost effective and easy. These days, there is just too much spam coming in. Crafting filters is a skilled job. It’s not that hard to run good filters. But to run good filters takes time to do well.
There are also a lot of challenges to sending mail. One of the discussions I had at the campsite was how hard it was to configure outbound mail. The engineer was helping a friend set up a website and trying to get the website to send notifications to the friend. But without setting up authentication the mail kept silently failing.
Of course, we do run our own mail server. But it’s our job and, in many ways, it keeps us honest. We don’t run many filters meaning we see what spammers are doing and can use our own experiences to better understand what commercial filters are dealing with.
For most people, though, I really think using a service is the right solution. Find one with filters that meet your needs and just pay them to deal with the headache.
 

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The obvious application of machine learning for email is to send spam to the junk/bulk folder. Most services use some level of machine learning for filters. Places like Gmail have extensive machine learning filters to filter spam and unwanted mail away from their users.
Some organizations are taking the filtering process a step further. Almost every mail client more advanced than PINE has the ability for users to create rules to sort mail into folders.  Late last year, Office 365 rolled out a feature, Clutter that tracks how a user interacts with mail and filters unimportant mail. This allows each user to have their own filters, but without the overhead of having to create the filters.
The Clutter engine looks at both how the user interacts with mail and things it knows about the organization. For example, if Exchange is tied into Active Directory, then mail from a manager will be prioritized while mail from a co-worker may end up in the clutter folder.
Email is a critical business tool. A significant number of companies rely on email for internal and external communication. Many users treat their inbox as a todo list, prioritizing what they work on based on what’s in their mail box. Despite the needs of users, the mail client hasn’t really changed.
Over the last few years, we’ve seen different online services attempt to build a more effective email client. Some of these features were things like tabs and priority inbox at Gmail. Microsoft created the “sweep” feature for Outlook/Hotmail users to manage inbox clutter. Third parties have created services to try and improve the mailbox experience for their users. 
Many of the email filters, up to this point, have really been focused on protecting users from spam and malicious emails. Applying that filtering knowledge to more than just spam, but to the different kinds of emails makes sense to me. I’ve always had a fairly extensive set of filters, initially procmail but now sieve, to process and organize incoming mail. But I kinda like the idea that my mail client learns how I filter messages and do the right thing on its own.
I’d love to see some improvements in the mail client, that make it easier to manage and organize incoming email. It remains to be seen if this is a feature that takes off and makes its way to other clients or not.
 
 

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Looking at the headers within the mail received with my Office365 domain I see dmarc=bestguesspass.  BestGuessPass?  That’s a new.
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