Word to the Wise » Meta

Back in the USA

laura — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 17:03:15 +0000

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.

Approaching Edinburgh castle.

Looking down on the town from Edinburg castle.

Edinburgh castle has cannons pointed out over the city.

Holyrood Palace: the Queen's official residence

The park outside Holyrood Palace

On Hiatus

laura — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:53:46 +0000

I have my final call of 2011 in 6 minutes, so I decided to take a break from packing and wish everyone joyous and festive holiday, whatever you celebrate. We’re on hiatus through Jan 8th, but will return full of energy, single malt and ideas.

We didn’t get a tree up this year, so I have no photos of our cats playing tree ornament. So I share with you my friend Joanna’s cat, in his Christmas tree.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hogmanay and anything else you might be celebrating this season.

10 years

laura — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 23:49:17 +0000

Today is our 10 year anniversary in business. It’s been quite a ride.

Thank you to all our customers, friends, supporters and followers.

Happy Thanksgiving

laura — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 22:37:02 +0000

I’m still catching up from being out last week, so no blog post today. I do, however, have tart to share. Mostly. Sorta. We ate it all.

mmmm... pear and almond tart

A short note

laura — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 13:46:19 +0000

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.

Delivery reference site

laura — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:45:00 +0000

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.

Holiday Break

laura — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 17:57:54 +0000

I did have the absolute best of intentions to finish the Ugly part of my series on “The Good, The Typical and the Ugly” while on the plane yesterday. But, as things sometimes go, it didn’t happen. Blogging will be light through Jan 4th as I’m actually taking some time to visit family, relax and recharge. When I get back I’ll have a post about the ugly end of senders and ESPs as well as some advice on how to join the ranks of the good. I’m also planning to have some new resources available and announced early in January.

May everyone traveling have safe journeys. Happy Christmas.

New Blog Design

steve — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:23:50 +0000

After a little more than two years and 500 posts we thought it was time for a redesign of the Word to the Wise blog.

While we were cleaning up the design we also fixed some functionality that was broken and added some new features:

Everything should render cleanly in most any browser
Search works!
The archives, over on the right hand side, are a lot easier to navigate
If you visit the blog from your cellphone you’ll get a nice layout customized for the smaller screen
Down at the bottom of each post are some little badges that’ll let you share the article via twitter or facebook or digg or …
The little badges also let you send the article via email, or convert it to a print-friendly PDF
There’s a live-ish feed of Laura and I on twitter on the right hand side
If you post a comment you’ll find that we generate a little monster avatar for you, if you don’t have a gravatar set up
Our RSS feed for new comments is a bit more visible than it was

We’ll be tweaking things over the next couple of weeks – if you see any problems comment here or email us

Contact addresses and spam

laura — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 02:06:32 +0000

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.

Traveling again!

laura — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:50:56 +0000

I’m headed off early tomorrow morning to help celebrate a friend’s wedding (Hi Al!). I’ll be back at work on Tuesday and blogging will be back on schedule.