Starting around 10:15 2:45 EDT this morning, the Barracuda Email Security Service is having a issues processing email for customers.
More information on Twitter and reddit
Google's Inbox Team answers questions on Reddit
The team behind Google’s new Inbox app did an “Ask us Anything” Q&A with reddit on December 3rd. The team consisted of a Product Manager, Designer, and Software Engineer and for two hours the team answered all sorts of questions. Most of the questions were about new features or supporting additional email providers and it showed just how new this app is, it’s not quite ready to be your...
Our new team members
This has been a busy year here at Word to the Wise. We started out launching our new website in Q1 and have been busily growing our client base. In order to meet the increased demand for our expertise, we’ve brought in new team members. Meri has been working with us for a few months, helping me with client research and generally keeping my schedule under control. She was previously in ops...
November 2014 – the month in email
Over the years, we get many of the same questions again and again. This isn’t a complaint; it’s a useful opportunity for us to check in and see if the technologies, policies and best practices have evolved over time, or if our previous recommendations still stand. One example this month of something that has changed (the situation has improved a bit): Using URL shorteners and one that has not:...
Congestion at Verizon
Yahoo! finally found their broken cable (I had no idea Yahoo had fiber) and fixed it. Now, I’m seeing a lot of reports that Verizon is accepting mail very, very slowly. Some folks are reporting no more than 20 messages a minute. This could be due to congestion, and just an underpowered system, or it could be some purposeful throttling on Verizon’s end. In any case, this is affecting a...
My holiday email prediction
I was on IRC with a group of ESP delivery specialists last week and one of them was looking for something to blog about. I suggested a list of holiday predictions. Not that I have a huge number of holiday predictions, but I did come up with one. During the holiday season at least one retailer will decide that they have information so important that they will ignore my opt-0ut request and add me...
Yahoo problems
I’m seeing scattered reports today that a lot of places are seeing backed up queues to Yahoo. They’ve had some problems over the last few days and seem to be still recovering. It’s looking like it’s something internal to Yahoo. One set of error messages I’ve seen reported by numerous people is: “451 4.3.2 Internal error reading data.” It’s not you...
Changing the email client
We’re in the thick of hiring and next week is Thanksgiving, so blogging is going to be very light for the next two weeks. One thing I have noticed is that lately there are attempts to “change how people interact with email.” Google released their Inbox product. And today I saw a post about an IBM attempt to change email and how people use it as a tool. I find as I juggle more...
STARTTLS and misplaced outrage
About a month ago someone posted a heavily elided screenshot that they claimed was evidence of their ISP, AT&T, sabotaging SMTP connections being sent over their network, meaning that anyone could sniff their passwords and traffic. This is it: Most email people looking at that saw the asterisks in the banner and went “Oh. That’s not the ISP tampering with the...