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.
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.
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.
Happy April! I’m just back from the EEC conference in New Orleans, which was terrific. I wrote a quick post about a great session on content marketing, and I’ll have more to add about the rest of the conference over the next week or so. Stay tuned!
Here’s a look at what caught our attention in March:
On the DMARC front, we noted that both Yahoo and mail.ru are moving forward with p=reject, and Steve offered some advice for ESPs and software developers on methods for handling this gracefully. I also answered an Ask Laura question about making the decision to publish DMARC. Look for more on that in this month’s Ask Laura questions…
Our other Ask Laura question this month was about changing ESPs, which senders do for many reasons. It’s useful to know that there will generally be some shifts in deliverability with any move. Different ESPs measure engagement in different ways, and other issues may arise in the transition, so it’s good to be aware of these if you’re contemplating a change.
In industry news, I wrote a sort of meta-post about how the Internet is hard (related: where do you stand on the great Internet vs. internet debate? Comment below!) and we saw several examples of that this month, including a privacy debacle at Florida State University. Marketing is hard, too. I revisited an old post about a fraud case where a woman sued Toyota over an email marketing “prank”. As always, my best practices recommendation for these sorts of things (and everything else!) really boils down to one thing: send wanted email.
Steve wrote extensively about SPF this month in two must-read posts, where he explained the SPF rule of ten and how to optimize your SPF records. He also wrote about Mutt, the much-loved command line email client, and marked the passing of industry pioneer Ray Tomlinson, who, in addition to his many accomplishments, was by all accounts a very thoughtful and generous man.
Finally, I occasionally like to take a moment and follow the twisty paths that lead to my spam folder. Here’s a look at how Ugg spams my email doppelganger, MRS LAURA CORBISHLEY. In other spam news, there’s a lot of very interesting data in the recent 10 Worst list from Spamhaus. Take a look if you haven’t seen it yet.