Do you run spam filters?

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 mentioned earlier, somehow Velocity NY accepted my talk on ‘Ethical Obligations in Internet Operations’. In order to help me better understand our profession(s) and to prepare a better talk, I’ve put together a short, anonymous questionnaire for everybody involved in “Internet Operations”.
“Internet Operations” is the term I use here to combine the various ill- or loosely defined job descriptions relating to the general “tech industry” beyond the job of “Programmer”. If you write infrastructure code, you are working in “Internet Operations”. If you control the network of your organization and who they peer with, you are working in “Internet Operations”. If you run a company that influences how non-technical people use the internet, you are working in “Internet Operations”. In short, if you’re interested in attending Velocity, you’re likely working in “Internet Operations”.
Please take the five minutes to fill out this form. If you were to also share the link on your social and professional network, that’d be much appreciated, too. And of course, if you have questions or comments, you can email me at jschauma@netmeister.org or contact me on Twitter @jschauma.

This ties in with some of the recent posts about “sysadmins” having too much power to block mail. If you’re one of the folks in “internet operations” as Jan widely defines it, go over and fill out the survey.

Related Posts

Email filtering: not going away.

VirusBlockI 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 up for The Myth of the Low Complaint Rate.

Read More

Politics and Delivery

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.

Read More

Do system administrators have too much power?

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 mighty wide (and — in my experience — probably incorrect) brush to be painting with, particularly when referring to operations at ISPs with any significant number of mailboxes. My fundamental opposition to use of the term comes down to this: It’s no longer 1998.
The sort of rogue (or perhaps ‘maverick’) behavior to which you refer absolutely used to be a thing, back when a clean 56k dial-up connection was the stuff of dreams and any ISP that had gone through the trouble to figure out how to get past the 64k user limit in the UNIX password file was considered both large and technically competent. Outside of a few edge cases, I don’t know many system administrators these days who are able to (whether by policy or by access controls) — much less want to — make such unilateral deliverability decisions.
While specialization may be for insects, it’s also inevitable whenever a system grows past a certain point. When I started in the field, there were entire ISPs that were one-man shows (at least on the technical side). This simply doesn’t scale. Eventually, you start breaking things up into departments, then into services, then teams assigned to services, then parts of services assigned to teams, and back up the other side of the mountain, until you end up with a whole department whose job it is to run one component of one service.
For instance, let’s take inbound (just inbound) email. It’s not uncommon for a large ISP to have several technical teams responsible for the processing of mail being sent to their users:

Read More