In early September, I posted about a survey being done by Jan Schaumann regarding how sysadmins viewed their ethical obligations with regard to users. The results of this have now been published by Jan. He’s also shared his talk and slides on the data. Well worth a look through the data. I took a quick run through of his talk and it looked interesting and is definitely going on my to-read...
Jan Schaumann is putting together a talk on ethics in as related to folks managing internet operations. He has a survey and is looking for folks who wrangle the machines that run the internet. I’m copying his post, with permission, due to a slightly NSFW image on his announcement. August 3rd, 2015 Actually, it’s about Ethics in Internet Operations. No, seriously, it actually is. As...
Yesterday, Laura brought a thread from last week to my attention, and the old-school ISP admin and mail geek in me felt the need to jump up and say something in response to Paul’s comment. My text here is all my own, and is based upon personal experience as well as those of my friends. That said, I’m not speaking on their behalf, either. 🙂 I found Paul’s use of the word ‘SysAdmin’ to be a...
Last week I posted some deliverability advice for the DNC based on their acquisition of President Obama’s 2012 campaign database. Paul asked a question on that post that I think is worth some attention. I am fascinated by the ramifications of email deliverability for political donations. Are there sysadmins at the big ISPs who make human decisions on deliverability issues anymore? The power...
Last week I had the pleasure of speaking to the Sendgrid Customer Advisory Board about email and deliverability. As usually happens when I give talks, I learned a bunch of new things that I’m now integrating into my mental model of email. One thing that bubbled up to take over a lot of my thought processes is how important data collection and data maintenance is to deliverability. In fact...
I don’t do a whole lot of filtering of comments here. There are a couple people who are moderated, but generally if the comments contribute to a discussion they get to be posted. I do get the occasional angry or incoherent comment. And sometimes I get a comment that is triggers me to write an entire blog post pointing out the problems with the comment. Today a comment from Joe King showed...
Here are the top 6 most commented on blog topics our Industry News & Analysis blog. In April, Laura wrote about the ins and outs about Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance also known as DMARC. Â If you are not familiar with DMARC or want to know the differences between strict and relaxed alignment, read the blog post here. Earlier this year WttW’s website was...
A bit of  a throwback post from Steve a few years ago. The problem has gotten a little better as some shortening companies are actually disabling spammed URLs, and blocking URLs with problematic content. I still don’t recommend using a public URL shortener in email messages, though. Any time you put a URL in mail you send out, you’re sharing the reputation of everyone who uses URLs with...
There seems to be a never ending debate about volume and how it affects delivery and revenue. I regularly get questions asking if ISPs block senders just for volume. The answer is no. Unless you’re actually sending enough mail to overwhelm the incoming infrastructure, something that’s difficult on today’s internet, you’re unlikely to be blocked due to simply sending a high...
One of the worst ways to deal with blocking issues is to ignore them and hope your mail magically moves from the bulk folder back into the inbox. While this does happen as ISPs and filter companies update their filters, it’s not that common and it’s usually the result of a sender actually cleaning up their sending processes and improving the quality of the mail they send. Do not...
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