A site for, by, and about Internet postmasters regarding the role of postmasters and the tools, skills, and information they need.

http://www.role-of-postmaster.com/

Strata's Postmaster/Messaging Links

Got a useful link for postmasters? Tell me!

Want to test to see if you are blocking spam correctly? Russ Nelson allows private use of his Crynwr spam tester.

posted by Strata Chalup at 3:27 PM

Consumer Sentinel

The site to point folks to who have been victimized by spam schemes, or who are wondering if something that sounds too good to be true might just be...

posted by Strata Chalup at 11:49 AM

Infamous Spammer Spammed

" A spokesperson for Pipex confirmed that a bulk mailing of 2 million pieces of spam sent through its servers by a Canadian firm last Wednesday caused the failure of its own e-mail service."

Worth loading the page for all the other links to spam fighting resources and current stories. Some are old hat, some are things I haven't seen before.

posted by Strata Chalup at 12:01 PM

Speaking of web bugs, we'll have to be very careful in implementing RFC 2298, if at all, in order to protect our users' privacy. As the Introduction says, "This memo defines a MIME content-type [5] for message disposition notifications (MDNs). An MDN can be used to notify the sender of a message of any of several conditions that may occur after successful delivery, such as display of the message contents, printing of the message, deletion (without display) of the message, or the recipient's refusal to provide MDNs. The "message/disposition-notification" content-type defined herein is intended for use within the framework of the "multipart/report" content type defined in RFC 1892 [7]." (Emphasis mine)

To be honest, I'm not sure that 2298 will do anything that I care to have done, and even reporting "refusal to provide MDN's" is a tracking mechanism in and of itself-- it differentiates between a bounce and an accept-without-details. I have not been paying a lot of attention to the newer email RFC's, to be honest, so I don't know the rationale behind this. I'm sure there's something beneficial that somebody wants to accomplish here, so I'll go and take a look on the ietf-wg archives to try to find out what the authors were intending. If anyone has some insight on this, I'd love a quick note explaining it.

Then there's RFC 1894 the capabilities section: "Allow "foreign" notifications to be tunneled through a MIME-capable message system and back into the original messaging system that issued the original notification, or even to a third messaging system"

posted by Strata Chalup at 11:40 AM

One of the tools to help educate your user community on privacy issues is this great Web Bug FAQ, including a section on Web Bugs in email messages.

posted by Strata Chalup at 11:32 AM

Postmaster Survey

If you're a postmaster, could you spare a few minutes to fill out a survey? No, it's not a marketing survey! Read on, to the explanatory note sent to sage-members, baylisa, and list-managers...

 If you are the postmaster for your organization, or are filling that role in addition to other duties, I would like to ask you to donate a few minutes to fill out a survey. If not, you can hit "d" now. :-) Brian Kerouac and I are working on a draft of the SAGE postmaster booklet. We're also working on expanding the postmaster body of knowledge in general. To the latter end, I've made a survey on one of the free websurvey sites. I'll be paying to upgrade it in a few days, but for now it can only take 500 responses. The results will be available to anyone, and posted to the web with a copyleft or similar that keeps them freely available to all. Taking the survey should only take a few minutes, and you don't have to log in or register or anything like that. Please give it a try! I passed it by the folks who were at the LISA Postmaster BOF, and so far no complaints and a dozen or so folks have had a chance to fill it out. Time to widen the scope a little. http://www.surveypro.com/cgi-bin/surveypro/run_survey.cgi?id=490 Please feel free to pass the URL on to *individuals* who you know are postmasters for sites, but please ask them not to pass it further, and please don't send it to any other lists. I'm still trying to unsnarl a problem with the online method they have to pay to upgrade the survey, and it still has the 500 user cap. Thanks much, _Strata PS- This is a volunteer undertaking, and is in no way funded by or connected with SAGE or Usenix. I will be making the results available to those organizations, however, as well as everyone else. :-) 

posted by Strata Chalup at 7:15 PM

Welcome!

There seem to be very few resources dedicated to postmastering, despite the plethora of resources dealing with the technical details of mail administration. This is one attempt to help fix that.

posted by Strata Chalup at 7:10 PM