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

June is travel month!

A quick post to say that posting will be light the next few weeks. I’m off later this week to visit Dublin. After I get back from that I’m headed to Chicago to speak at ACTIVATE hosted by Active Campaign. If you register by tomorrow you can use the code ACTIVATE and get in for $200. It’s looking like a good conference.
I’ll be speaking about deliverability, specifically how email filtering is all sorts of changing. My focus is on how the common “deliverability” techniques aren’t as effective in the new filtering environment. I’ll also be talking about further changes I see coming and how to address them.
After Chicago I’m onsite at a client’s for 2 days in Florida.
Basically, my June is booked. Both Steve and I will be blogging as we get inspired or have something to say. Overall, though, I’m giving myself time off from blogging through the end of the month.

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Happy Thanksgiving

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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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