More awesome than email

This morning was the final flight of the Space Shuttle Endeavor. In fact, it was the last flight of any shuttle ever, anywhere. We were lucky enough to get passes to NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field to watch the flyover.

The Shuttle appearing from behind Hangar One
Technology is so awesome. Sometimes we spend so much time sweating the details, we miss the bigger picture.
Godspeed, Endeavor.

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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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Back in the USA

We’re back from our overseas adventures. I’m still wrapping my head around getting back to work. We had a great trip and did tons of fun stuff, including carrying torches through the streets of Edinburgh. I took almost 1000 photos which I’m slowly going through and posting on flickr.
I’ll get back to posting about email, but thought I’d share a couple of photos from Edinburgh behind the cut.

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5 Years

It’s been 5 years since my first post here at Word to the Wise. 5 years and over 1150 posts.
In that time I’ve written about a lot of topics relevant to email delivery.
I’ve talked about permission and why it’s a relevant part of email delivery. I’ve discussed spamfilters and why understanding how they work improves the decisions senders make about email delivery. I’ve talked about blocklists and filters and how they are a part of the email landscape senders have to navigate. I’ve talked about reputation and engagement relevance.
I’ve also talked about the things that show up in my own mailbox. Like some of the spam I receive. I’ve even used that to point out what spammers do.
Steve‘s written quite a bit here, too. Often his articles are much more technical, like how he tracks down spammers.
We’ve written about legal cases, including e360 v. Spamhaus, which was the subject of my inaugural post. I also followed the case of Holomaxx v. Hotmail and Yahoo. And, of course, how different countries create and enforce anti-spam laws.
I have no idea how many words I’ve written in the last 5 years, but Steve swears to me it’s enough to write a book about email delivery. However many words I’ve typed into the ether, it really is the folks who participate here in conversation, who email me directly with questions and comments, who stop me at conferences and tell me how much they like reading the blog that keep me writing. I’ve enjoyed blogging way more than I thought I would, but I wouldn’t enjoy it half as much if readers didn’t enjoy it, too.
Thanks so much for reading here over the past 5 years. It’s been a lot of fun.

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