The FCC recently published a notice of proposed rulemaking that will have an impact on how we fight abuse on the internet. M3AAWG has submitted a comment on the proposal (pdf link). All submissions can be found on the FCC website.
I have an email address that’s old enough to drink. It came to me today when I was discussing data hygiene. I mean, I have an email address that is old enough to drink! And it wasn’t even my first email address, it’s just the one I still have access to.
This realization led me down a path of what things have changed since I got that address.
I remember …
… when things posted on the Internet weren’t around forever.
… when Google bought DejaNews and made USENET archives more available.
When you’re developing code to handle data it’s almost essential to have a decent sized set of test data, so you can build a test harness to check on functionality and performance as you go.
A common way of doing that is to take a snapshot of your production database and pull out an appropriate subset from there. That works pretty well in most cases, but it’s a really bad idea if the data you’re working with is personally identifiable information, such as email addresses, phone numbers, credit cards and so on.
Test data gets spread everywhere. It’s checked in to source control systems, copied to developers laptops, included in publicly visible bug reports, shared with mailing lists when asking questions and sent to that dodgy overseas outsourcing company your CTO is evaluating. And if the code you’re developing sends email or SMS messages then sooner or later you’re going to misconfigure your test platform and send test messages to the contacts in your test data. (I’ve only done that once, and it was a memorable experience.)
But test data needs to be similar to real data, and look plausible, or it’s hard for manual testers to identify problems using it.
Enter randomuser.me – a simple API for generating random user data – name, email address, birthdate, phone numbers, postal address, social security number, even photos.
Need something more configurable, that lets you create a fake API to test your code against? Try RandomAPI for a web API returning JSON, SQL, CSV or YAML.
Just need some test JSON files you can generate and paste in to your test suite? Try JSON Generator.
Need bulk data, to load into your test database? Look at Mockaroo, DummyData or GenerateData.
Just don’t use your production PII, even if you plan on anonymizing it before use. Really.
September’s big adventure was our trip to Stockholm, where I gave the keynote address at the APSIS Conference (Look for a wrapup post with beautiful photos of palaces soon!) and had lots of interesting conversations about all things email-related.
Now that we’re back, we’re working with clients as they prepare for the holiday mailing season. We wrote a post on why it’s so important to make sure you’ve optimized your deliverability strategy and resolved any open issues well in advance of your sends. Steve covered some similar territory in his post “Outrunning the Bear”. If you haven’t started planning, start now. If you need some help, give us a call.
In that post, we talked a bit about the increased volumes of both marketing and transactional email during the holiday season, and I did a followup post this week about how transactional email is defined — or not — both by practice and by law. I also wrote a bit about reputation and once again emphasized that sending mail people actually want is really the only strategy that can work in the long term.
While we were gone, I got a lot of spam, including a depressing amount of what I call “legitimate spam” — not just porn and pharmaceuticals, but legitimate companies with appalling address acquisition and sending strategies. I also wrote about spamtraps again (bookmark this post if you need more information on spamtraps, as I linked to several previous discussions we’ve had on the subject) and how we need to start viewing them as symptoms of larger list problems, not something that, once eradicated, means a list is healthy. I also posted about Jan Schaumann’s survey on internet operations, and how this relates to the larger discussions we’ve had on the power of systems administrators to manage mail (see Meri’s excellent post here<).
I wrote about privacy and tracking online and how it’s shifted over the past two decades. With marketers collecting and tracking more and more data, including personally-identifiable information (PII), the risks of organizational doxxing are significant. Moreso than ever before, marketers need to be aware of security issues. On the topic of security and cybercrime, Steve posted about two factor authentication, and how companies might consider providing incentives for customers to adopt this model.