The ability to work "offline" is one of the last bastions of rich clients. Alchemy is an initiative to overcome this limitation.
CNET article with more information
Tuesday, September 07, 2004
Sunday, August 29, 2004
Fahrenheit 9/11
Since I was a child, every time I've read or heard about Nazi history I wondered how the German people at this time could be so blinded to believe what the Nazi government told them.
During the last 3 years since September 9/11 2001 I was contemporary witness how the president of the United States took his own country and to some extent the whole world for a ride. I never agreed with Bush's anti-terror policy and his Iraq war. However, to be honest, initially I was not really sure about my opposition and e.g. would not have taken part in a anti-war demonstration. Today I wish I had. When the German and French government opposed the war, I was worried that we are isolating ourselves and are putting our friendship with the US on the line - a country that significantly helped liberating Europe from Nazism. Today I am proud of the stableness of the German government in the Iraq war question (although I am not really sure how pure the motives were ...).
What has happend during the past 3 years is hard to believe, its scaring.
During the last 3 years since September 9/11 2001 I was contemporary witness how the president of the United States took his own country and to some extent the whole world for a ride. I never agreed with Bush's anti-terror policy and his Iraq war. However, to be honest, initially I was not really sure about my opposition and e.g. would not have taken part in a anti-war demonstration. Today I wish I had. When the German and French government opposed the war, I was worried that we are isolating ourselves and are putting our friendship with the US on the line - a country that significantly helped liberating Europe from Nazism. Today I am proud of the stableness of the German government in the Iraq war question (although I am not really sure how pure the motives were ...).
What has happend during the past 3 years is hard to believe, its scaring.
Saturday, August 21, 2004
Email Newsletter Science
Managing email newsletters is not as simple as one might think ...
The most simple approach is doing it manually: maintain the list of recipients manually, manually add or remove subscribers upon request and send out the email with a normal email client using the BCC field. There are several problems with this approach:
I have been using Yahoo Groups for managing the 300-recipient mailing list for a long time. Yahoo Groups handle automated list management (subscribe/unsubscribe), however did not provide double-opt-in. Yahoo Groups also completely automated bounced email handling. The mailmerge engine of Yahoo Groups puts a special "return-path" information into each mail, so all bounced email is not sent to the newsletter sender, but to the Yahoo Groups system where it is processed automatically: "Return-Path: [unique-mailing-code]@returns.groups.yahoo.com". The Yahoo Groups system automatically detects the bounce reason and reacts accordingly, i.e. either retries several times to deliver the email, remove the recipient from the list, etc. When the newsletter recipient is using the "Reply" button in his email client, this reply email will still go directly to the sender of the newsletter. Very nice!
However Yahoo Groups had a huge security problem: the list owner can post a message to the list simply by sending an email to the list's email address ([mailing-list-name]@yahoogroups.com). The Yahoo Groups system would only check if the "From" address equals the list owners' email address. Someone of my 300 recipients got infected with one of those viruses that replicates itself by sending emails with forged "From" addresses, and so his virus was distributed to the 300 recipients of my mailing list. Not very funny. This was the last day I ever used Yahoo Groups.
So, I switched over to the mailmerge function of the CMS I am using for the website (Peachtree WebsiteCreator). Unfortunately this one neither has double-opt-in, nor does it have automated bounce handling... (at least not yet).
For another website I am currently working on I use the open source CMS "Mambo", and there is also a newsletter and mailing list management component available ("YANC") which does support double-opt-in. YANC has no automated bounce-processing (it does not use the Return-Path header field), however, it does something I would call "bounce prevention". Its SMTP engine (PHPMailer) first checks if the recipient's email server exists. If not, the email is not sent, a non-delivery-report is not created. If the recipients email server is available but refuses to accept the recipient email address, YANC will immediately abort this email transfer. Again no bounce / non-delivery email is created. Finally, if the email gateway of the recipient does accept the email, and then forwards it to the recipients email server and then this email server detects that the recipient address is unknown, generation of a bounce email is still prevented because YANC has added the "Precedence: bulk" field to the envelope of the email. This does also suppress "Out-Of-Office" replies and "mailbox quota exceeded" bounce messages.
So in summary, there are two approaches:
The most simple approach is doing it manually: maintain the list of recipients manually, manually add or remove subscribers upon request and send out the email with a normal email client using the BCC field. There are several problems with this approach:
- Limited to small number of recipients: the number of emails accepted in the TO or BCC field is limited of course.
- Newsletter might get rated as spam and might help virus spread: if you use the BCC field, your email might be killed by spam filters. You shouldn't put all recipients into the TO field as well, because then every recipient sees the email addresses of all the other recipients and could send a newsletter himself via "reply all". And today's viruses are actually looking for emails with many recipients in the email archive of infected PCs and spreading viruses between the list of recipients.
- Implementing a double-opt-in policy is difficult: The motivation for double-opt-in is typically legal reasons. You want to make sure that the person who adds an email address to the list is really the owner of this email. This requires sending the subscriber a "secret link" which is unique for each subscriber. Only after the subscriber has sent this secret and unique information back, he is activated as newsletter subscriber.
- handling bounced email: the larger the mailing list becomes, the more important is automated bounced email handling. Recently I sent out a 300-recipient newsletter. I got about 30 bounce messages back: 12x "unknown user", 5x "mailbox quota exceeded", 3x "unknown domain", 3x "invalid email address", 3x "email delivery delayed, 1x "invalid data in message", etc ... Now imagine this with a 3000 recipient newsletter or even larger ones.
I have been using Yahoo Groups for managing the 300-recipient mailing list for a long time. Yahoo Groups handle automated list management (subscribe/unsubscribe), however did not provide double-opt-in. Yahoo Groups also completely automated bounced email handling. The mailmerge engine of Yahoo Groups puts a special "return-path" information into each mail, so all bounced email is not sent to the newsletter sender, but to the Yahoo Groups system where it is processed automatically: "Return-Path: [unique-mailing-code]
However Yahoo Groups had a huge security problem: the list owner can post a message to the list simply by sending an email to the list's email address ([mailing-list-name]@yahoogroups.com). The Yahoo Groups system would only check if the "From" address equals the list owners' email address. Someone of my 300 recipients got infected with one of those viruses that replicates itself by sending emails with forged "From" addresses, and so his virus was distributed to the 300 recipients of my mailing list. Not very funny. This was the last day I ever used Yahoo Groups.
So, I switched over to the mailmerge function of the CMS I am using for the website (Peachtree WebsiteCreator). Unfortunately this one neither has double-opt-in, nor does it have automated bounce handling... (at least not yet).
For another website I am currently working on I use the open source CMS "Mambo", and there is also a newsletter and mailing list management component available ("YANC") which does support double-opt-in. YANC has no automated bounce-processing (it does not use the Return-Path header field), however, it does something I would call "bounce prevention". Its SMTP engine (PHPMailer) first checks if the recipient's email server exists. If not, the email is not sent, a non-delivery-report is not created. If the recipients email server is available but refuses to accept the recipient email address, YANC will immediately abort this email transfer. Again no bounce / non-delivery email is created. Finally, if the email gateway of the recipient does accept the email, and then forwards it to the recipients email server and then this email server detects that the recipient address is unknown, generation of a bounce email is still prevented because YANC has added the "Precedence: bulk" field to the envelope of the email. This does also suppress "Out-Of-Office" replies and "mailbox quota exceeded" bounce messages.
So in summary, there are two approaches:
- Adding "Precedence: bulk" to the email envelope to suppress any bounce email
- Adding "Return-Path: ..." to the email envelope to direct any bounce email to a special mailbox where all bounced email is processed by an intelligent algorithm that will automatically purge dead email addresses from the mailing list
I think the first option is the perfect solution for mailing lists up to several 1000 recipients - several 100 dead email addresses just don't matter in this case. If you get beyond 10000 recipients it starts making sense to purge dead email addresses from the list because of processing time / bandwidth cost.
Wednesday, August 04, 2004
Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Lookout email search for Microsoft Outlook - Lookout Software
Lookout is lightning-fast fulltext search for Outlook email archives and files. Works as Outlook plugin. The version 1.1 is still free.
Sub-second fulltext search in my 3 years - 1.5 GB email archive. And the index is as small as 40MB.
Sub-second fulltext search in my 3 years - 1.5 GB email archive. And the index is as small as 40MB.
Friday, June 18, 2004
The IT spend time bomb | The Register
There are companies who are operating legacy systems for which the associated expertise has all but disappeared. The functions delivered and the design therein may no longer be recorded and understood. Even trying to construct a replacement and migration strategy alone may incur significant costs to just reach a point where the scope and consequences are understood.
Monday, June 14, 2004
IT still matters - It's what you do with it...
Interesting article about Nicolas Carr's Harvard Business Review article, the current trend to "utility computing" - i.e. commoditizing of the "lower layers of IT" - coming up with a result I fully agree with it: It's what you do with it...
What 2007 means to your data center | The Register
This article questions today's blade server technology and suggests that multi-core chip technology will have the potential to dramatically change the datacenter architecture by 2007. I agree - so far I never really understood the benefit of blade servers, not just because of their surprisingly high cost, but because faster multi-core processors and virtual server technology might make blade servers obsolete.
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