A quick comment on commenting

I don’t have a published comment policy. Most people around here are polite enough I don’t think one is needed. There are a couple things I feel I should say, though.

  1. First posts are always moderated. This is moderation by email address so if you post using multiple addresses then your post will go into moderation.
  2. Anonymous posting is OK, I have no problem with folks who want or need to protect their identity on comments.
  3. Forging other people’s email addresses is not OK and if I notice you’re doing that, your posts will not be approved.
  4. Anonymously posting in order to harass or harangue is not OK. If you want to post anonymously, the post should add something to the conversation.
  5. I am the final arbiter of what is and is not adding to the conversation.

I’ve had so little comment abuse I haven’t seen the need to post a comment policy. But I am starting to see an uptick in the number of address forgeries and thought maybe it was time to say something.

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Contact addresses and spam

One of the challenges anyone doing business on the internet faces is how to provide contact information so that potential customers can reach you in a form that spammers can’t easily abuse. Contact forms are the classic method, but they can (and are) abused by spammers. We decided to try something different. About 2 months ago, we started using rotating contact addresses. Every day a new address is deployed on the contact form on our website. Each address is valid for a fixed period of time, and is then retired.
This seems to be working well for us. Spammers are harvesting the email addresses, but because they are only valid for a fixed period of time, the amount of spam in my mailbox is not overwhelming. I am spending less time searching for sales mails through spam. An interesting side effect is I can actually see who is harvesting addresses and spamming.
It’s not perfect, I’m still getting spam to that address. But it’s spam at a level where I’m not losing real mail.

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Delivery reference site

Over the years I’ve picked up a lot of useful and relevant information about email delivery. I’ve shared a lot of information here on the blog, and while that’s great, a blog is not a great format for a reference. The ISP information page was an initial pass at creating a reference. I realized that just linking to the ISP provided information didn’t communicate very much about how to deliver email even to those ISPs that were explicitly mentioned.
Enter the Word to the Wise Delivery Wiki to fill the need for a publicly accessible reference on email delivery. The cornerstone of the site is the ISP Information page. This page contains summary information about a number of ISPs, including known connection and sending limits. Each ISP mentioned on that page also has a individual page with more detailed information on delivering to that ISP. The information is as accurate as I could make it, and in many cases have been reviewed by representatives of the ISPs.
I welcome contributions from the general community. I will also be continuing to add content. My goal is to have a community resource for people handling email and delivery issues.

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A short note

We had a catastrophic failure of our mail server over the weekend. We lost both drives and the server won’t boot past the BIOS stage. Most of the weekend was spent on recovery and restoration, and we expect to have mail restored today. In the meantime, if you need to get a hold of me I’m available on AIM as wttwlaura and can be reached at my gmail account: wttwlaura.
This does mean I have the opportunity *ahem* to re-organized mail and my mail handling work flow. What better time to move to zero inbox than now when I have to rebuild my sieve scripts from scratch?
UPDATE: mail is back and I can be reached at the normal places, including through our contact link.

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