Wandering Thoughts archives

One of my worries: our spam filtering in the future

I've mentioned in the past that we rely on a commercial anti-spam system for our spam filtering. What I haven't mentioned is that it isn't supported on and doesn't run on any version of Ubuntu after Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. 10.04 is now rather long in the tooth and with the impending release of Ubuntu 14.04 it will fall out of support in a bit over a year. This doesn't leave us completely up the creek, as the vendor supports Red Hat Enterprise 6, but it does raise a concern: is the vendor still actually interested in this product?

(It's not as if the vendor is deliberately ignoring Ubuntu; the most recent Linux distribution that the vendor supports was released in 2011 (and that's Debian 6).)

Since I do have this concern, every so often I get to worry about how we'd replace this commercial package (either because of the vendor effectively dropping it or because of licensing problems, which have been known to happen). Right now the commercial system has three great virtues: it works quite well, it doesn't require any administration, and it's basically a black box. I suppose that it doesn't really cost us any money is a fourth virtue.

(The university has a site license, the costs for which are covered by the central mail system.)

There are probably other commercial options, but I don't know how much they'd cost or how well they work, and the thought of trying to evaluate the alternatives fills me with dread. I know that there are free alternatives (for both anti-spam and anti-virus stuff) but I suspect that they are not hands free and automatically maintained black boxes and I don't know how well they work. Evaluating the free options would be somewhat less of a hassle than evaluating commercial options (with free options there is no wrestling with vendors) but it wouldn't be a picnic either.

One part of me thinks that I should spend some time on keeping current with at least the free options for anti-spam filtering, just so I can be prepared if the worst happens. Another part of me thinks that that's a lot of work with no immediate payoff (in fact that doing the work now is probably a complete waste of time) and that I should defer it until we know we need a different anti-spam system, if ever.

I don't have any answers right now, just worries. So there you go.

Guessing whether people will unsubscribe from your mailing lists

Suppose that you have an administrative mailing list (or mailing lists), you understand that people can always unsubscribe one way or another, and you want to have some idea if people are going to do so. Here is my modest suggestion on a simple question to ask yourself about the messages going to the mailing list: are the mailing list messages actionable?

(Alternately you've been forced to run some mailing lists that people can't officially unsubscribe from and you'd like some guess at how many people actually read the messages.)

'Actionable' is jargon, but it's useful jargon. An actionable message is one that causes people to do things. So, does your average message tell the average recipient about something that the recipient needs to do (or know) right now or very soon? If they do not, some recipients may find the messages interesting but I think that a lot of people won't and are going to drop them.

(But, you say, your messages are full of interesting things. That's nice, but look, would your 'interesting things' go even moderately viral on Facebook or Twitter or wherever, even among a limited audience? If the answer is 'of course not' then they are nowhere near as interesting as you think. Being genuinely interesting is a very, very high bar.)

Obviously, the more actionable to the more people the better off you are and the less actionable you are to fewer and fewer people, well, that's not good. Completely non-actionable cheerful messages from eg your Dean (or some other high manager of your choice) almost certainly go straight to the round file.

(The unfortunate but honest truth is that today we simply don't have a good communication system for these sort of newsletter type things, at least if they're supposed to be relatively private. Email has stopped being it for all sorts of reasons that I don't feel like trying to write down in this entry.)