Policy is hard

We’re back at work after a trip to M3AAWG. This conference was a little different for me than previous ones. I spent a lot of time just talking with people – about email, about abuse, about the industry, about the ecosystem. Sometimes when you’re in a position like mine, you get focused way too much on the trees.

Of course, it’s the focusing on the trees that makes me good for my clients. I follow what’s going on closely, so they don’t have to. I pay attention so I can distill things into useable chunks for them to implement. Sometimes, though, I need to remember to look around and appreciate the forest. That’s what I got to do last week. I got to talk with so many great people. I got to hear what they think about email. The different perspectives are invaluable. They serve to deepen my understanding of delivery, email and where the industry is going.

One of the things that really came into focus for me is how critical protecting messaging infrastructure is. I haven’t spoken very much here about the election and the consequences and the changes and challenges we’re facing. That doesn’t mean I’m not worried about them or I don’t have some significant reservations about the new administration. It just means I don’t know how to articulate it or even if there is a solution.
The conference gave me hope. Because there are people at a lot of places who are in a place to protect users and protect privacy and protect individuals. Many of those folks were at the conference. The collaboration is still there. The concern for how we can stop or minimize bad behavior and what the implications are. Some of the most difficult conversations around policy involve the question who will this affect. In big systems, simple policies that seem like a no-brainer… aren’t. We’re seeing the effects of this with some of the realities the new administration and the Republican leaders of congress are realizing. Health care is hard, and complex. Banning an entire religion may not be a great idea. Governing is not like running a business.
Talking with smart people, especially with smart people who disagree with me, is one of the things that lets me see the forest. And I am so grateful for the time I spend with them.

Naming Names
Confirmed Opt-In: An Old Topic Resurrected

Related Posts

Back from M3AAWG

Last week was the another M3AAWG meeting in San Francisco. The conference was packed full of really interesting sessions and things to learn. Jayne’s keynote on Tuesday was great, and brought up a lot of memories of just what it was like to be fighting spam and online abuse in the mid to late 90s. It’s somewhat amazing to me that many of the people I first met, or even just heard about are still actively working to fight abuse and make the Internet safer.
Wednesday was another great keynote from Facebook, discussing security. Facebook is committed to sharing threat information and has started the ThreatExchange website as a hub for sharing data among large companies.
One thing that was amusing was during one talk someone mentioned YubiKey for managing logins. They said many people were sharing long strings of random keys that sometimes happen because someone has accidentally triggered the one time passcode. YubiKey is awesome, if sometimes ccccccdkhjnbitklrrtnhjrdfgdlhektfnfeutgtdcib inscrutable.
As has become a bit of a M3AAWG tradition lately, Wednesday was also kilt day. There may be pictures. For those of you planning to go to Dublin, Wednesday will be kilt day as well.
The conference was great, but ended on a bit of a down note. We received word that Wednesday night a long time friend, Ellen R., passed away due to complications from a stroke. The conference held a moment of silence for her at the end. Ellen was a friend as well as a colleague. She was around on IRC when we started this crazy experiment called Word to the Wise and was always helpful and insightful. She volunteered with, and then worked for, Spamcop and then volunteered with Spamhaus. Ellen will be very missed.
I started off the conference remembering all the friends I made back in the late 90s and ended it remembering and missing those who are no longer around. Email has been one amazing journey, and doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon.

Read More

And… we're back from London

The Email Innovations Summit in London was a good conference. Much smaller than Vegas, but with a number of very interesting talks. I got to meet a number of folks I’ve only known online and we had some interesting conversations at the conference and at the pub-track in the evenings.
FullSizeRender 3
I had so many grand plans for doing some work while in London. So many plans. And then I actually mostly disconnected and ignored anything I “should” be doing.  Instead, Steve and I did some touristing, some relaxing, some family time and some connecting with his college friends. We also (over)heard a lot of conversations about the US Election. One night at dinner every table around us was talking about our candidates and what they thought of them. It’s always interesting to hear what non-Americans think about our country.
In addition to missing two debates, it seems we missed some online news, too. I think the biggest thing was another large DDoS attack against that took out many major websites. I’m starting to see some comments that spam levels were down during the attack, too, but haven’t dug into that yet.
I did have an article published in the Only Influencers newsletter last week: Marketers Can’t Learn from Spam. All too often marketers think spammers are better at unboxing because they see spam in their inbox. But spammers are just more criminal and spend a lot of effort trying to bypass filters. These aren’t lessons marketers can learn from.
Unfortunately, due to our London trip, we are going to miss M3AAWG in Paris, which starts today. Two weeks between conferences was exactly the wrong time for going to both. Never fear, many folks will be tweeting what they can using #m3aawg38.
We’re both slowly getting back into the swing (and timezone!) of back to work. Blogging will pick up over the next few days. And I have new castle pictures to share.

Read More

M3AAWG 36 – San Francisco

So many familiar faces. So many new faces.
This is my one M3AAWG this year and I’m so excited to be here. The organization has really grown and changed over the 10 years we’ve been a member. It’s only getting better and better.
I’ll be tweeting from public sessions (and probably tweeting random things that occur to me as I’m here) using the #m3aawg36 tag.

Read More