Changes are coming…

We’ve been blogging here about email for 11 years now. My first post was published August 29, 2007. In that time, we’ve published more than 2300 posts, and written probably millions of words. For years we have blogged multiple times a week.

This summer we’ve not kept up our normal posting schedule. We’ve been a little busy with non-email stuff. We’ve spent this summer planning, purging, and packing for a big move. We’re almost finished, and early next month we’re getting on a plane with our cats and moving to Dublin, IE.

Picture of a church on a hill in Dublin, Ireland

We’re both excited about the move, and looking forward to living in a new place and meeting new friends.

Most of the changes are personal, but we’ve also been thinking about what business changes we’d like to implement. I have some exciting thoughts about the next phase of Word to the Wise, too. I am looking forward to sharing them with you in the coming months.

One of the big business changes is that we decommissioned our cabinet and have moved all our services into the cloud. We’ve run services on our own hardware since before we were Word to the Wise. Starting with a server sitting in the closet in a Boston apartment, then moving up to donated colo for SamSpade.org/. We’ve had a full cabinet for close to 15 years, first at Integra, then later at Hurricane Electric.

A few weekends ago we pulled the last of our hardware from HE. After we left the support folks sent us this picture of our servers acting as cat bed for the colo cat. 

Cat sitting on servers

Happily, this is all the e-waste we generated from all of the hardware gear we were using. A small amount is going with us to Dublin. But the bulk of our hardware, including some from ‘inside the firewall’ (i.e., the house) was donated to the Network Time Foundation.

 

Related Posts

August 2017: The month in email

Hello! Hope all are keeping safe through Harvey, Irma, Katia and the aftermath. I know many people that have been affected and are currently out of their homes. I am proud to see so many of my fellow deliverability folks are helping our displaced colleagues with resources, places to stay and money to replace damaged property.
Here’s a mid-month late wrapup of our August blog posts. Our favorite part of August? The total eclipse, which was absolutely amazing. Let me show you some pictures.





Ok, back to email.
We’re proud of the enormous milestone we marked this month: ten years of near-daily posts to our Word to the Wise blog. Thanks for all of your attention and feedback over the past decade!
In other industry news, I pointed to some interesting findings from the Litmus report on the State of Email Deliverability, which is always a terrific resource.
I also wrote about the evolution of filters at web-based email providers, and noted that Gmail’s different approach may well be because it entered the market later than other providers.
In spam, spoofing, and other abuse-related news, I posted about how easy it is for someone to spoof a sender’s identity, even without any technical hacks. This recent incident with several members of the US presidential administration should remind us all to be more careful with making sure we pay attention to where messages come from. How else can you tell that someone might not be wholly legitimate and above-board? I talked about some of what I look at when I get a call from a prospective customer as well as some of the delightful conversations I’ve had with spammers over the years.
In the security arena, Steve noted the ongoing shift to TLS and Google’s announcement that they will label text and email form fields on pages without TLS as “NOT SECURE”. What is TLS, you ask? Steve answers all your questions in a comprehensive post about Transport Layer Security and Certificate Authority Authorization records.
Also worth reading, and not just for the picture of Paddington Bear: Steve’s extremely detailed post about local-part semantics, the chunk of information before the at sign in an email address. How do you choose your email addresses (assuming they are not assigned to you at work or school…)? An email address is an identity, both culturally and for security purposes.
In subscription best practices — or the lack thereof — Steve talked about what happens when someone doesn’t quite complete a user registration. Should you send them a reminder to finish their registration? Of course! Should you keep sending those reminders for 16 months after they’ve stopped engaging with you? THE SURPRISING ANSWER! (Ok, you know us. It wasn’t that surprising.)

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A little housekeeping

I’ve been blogging regularly for over a decade now, and for much of that time I’ve posted 5 days a week. For a lot of reasons I’m finding that schedule harder and harder to keep up with. Part of it is that this spring I took on more, and bigger, clients than I have in the past. This means a larger portion of my time is scheduled and committed than in the past. I also find myself wanting to write about bigger, more complex issues; stuff that takes longer than the 45 minutes – 2 hours I regularly spend on blog posts.
The last few months, I’ve been considering what to do about blogging. I could simply cut back the amount I write here. Except that regularly blogging forces me to think about what’s going on in the broader industry, and that’s important to me and I think makes me a better consultant. I could write a few short posts a week, and a bigger meatier post once or twice a month, but I’ve been me long enough to know that’s not the best solution. I could just keep going as I have been most of this year and just post when I have something to say and not worry about frequency.
I still don’t have the answer. Of course, there’s not a right answer, there’s just a move forward and do what works. I have a lot of travel coming up next month (including speaking at Activate: The ActiveCampaign Conference) so things might get wonky for a while. But, I’m not planning on giving up blogging.
One of the consequences of my time constraints is that I have handed comment moderation off to other folks. Comments might sit for longer than they used to before approval. They’re being processed, just a little more slowly than they have in the past. I don’t think it’s a big deal, it’s not like there’s a significant horde of commenters here. When I was moderating comments basically anything that contributed to the discussion and didn’t come from a forged email address was approved. The current policy is similar.
I am around on the email geeks slack channel, and am often talking about stuff on the deliverability channel.
Thus ends the housekeeping.
 

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Healthcare, eh?

I’m deeply disappointed in the vote out of the Senate today.
We’re a small business. We have paid for our own health insurance since 2002. We’re very lucky – neither of us has any major issues. Before ACA went into effect I worried about what would happen if one of us were to become sick. Would we fall afoul of our lifetime limits? Due to a rare cancer, my mother hit those back before I graduated college. Would our coverage be pulled because I didn’t mention the broken wrist from when I was 3? There were so many questions, and so many unknowns.
I watched the cost of our insurance go up and up. We bought a house in the Bay Area, and our health insurance was nearly 2/3 of our mortgage payment. Every year the price went up a little more, and the benefits went down.
Then ACA happened. I could stop worrying about lifetime limits and rescission. Our premiums dropped by hundreds of dollars a month. The costs of our monthly prescriptions plummeted to near zero.
Then Trumpcare and massive amounts of turmoil in the markets. Our group provider cancelled our policy and I’ve spent the last two months or so working with insurance agents to get ourselves covered. Our provider gave us 60 days notice. It wasn’t enough to ensure continual coverage. We were finally approved last week, with better coverage and lower premiums than we were paying pre-ACA.
I worry, though, about what happens to us if Trumpcare passes. Will premiums go back to where they were preACA? Will the small business market just evaporate? I don’t need a tax cut near as much as I need to know that the healthcare markets will be stable.
I want to focus on the things I’m good at. I know there’s a certain amount of administrative overhead related to being a small business owner and that these things are unavoidable. But still, there doesn’t seem to be any real benefit to blowing up health care in this underhanded fashion.
We are some of the folks who will get a tax break – not a huge one but we will be a beneficiary. I don’t think it will be enough to counter the jump in premiums – even if the premiums just go back to where they were pre-ACA.
I know policy is hard; I do it for a living. I know it’s not fun to watch the sausage being made – I grew up in DC. ACA has issues. But from my point of view the current healthcare debate is doing nothing to actually fix the issues. Instead, they’re making everything worse. Long term? We have options and money; we’ll probably be fine. But there are a lot of people who don’t have the options we do, and they’re going to be hurt.
This is bad policy, bad lawmaking and bad for small businesses like mine.

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