Mail Management/Meeting Notes 2017-07-17

Mail Management

Date

Monday, 17 July 2017 from 7:00pm to 9:00pm

Event Announcement

https://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/240752492/

Location

Communitech Jelly Bean Room 1st Floor, 151 Charles Street West, Kitchener, Ontario Map

Is e-mail obsolete? If not, how can we provide e-mail services to our Non-profit organizations? Do we treat internal, staff e-mail differently from our clients' e-mail? How do we communicate with large groups? What mailing list services are there? Do we just give all our e-mail to Google and Microsoft? Maybe we can use the e-mail from our ISPs? They advertise "unlimited mailboxes", right? Do we run our own e-mail servers? But then, how do we deal with spam, blocklists, and e-mail providers that don't play fair? And, is it "E-mail" or "Email"?

KWNPSA is in the process of setting up our own e-mailing lists, and we have plenty of e-mail system administrators in the group. Looking forward to a lively Round Table discussion!

--Bob Jonkman & Marc Paré

• Mail Management/Meeting Notes 2017-07-17

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• Obsolete? Alternatives to E-mail:
  • Aren't we all on Slack by now?
    • Slack has some free options, also paid ones
    • eg. voice and video options
    • E-mail threads have messages and reply text, but slack has just the continuous stream-of-consciousness
    • Bots: "What's my schedule on Thursday?", "Bot, book me lunch with Kirk on Tuesday"
      • Regular expression bots, "human in the loop" bots, and "IBM Watson" hyperintelligent bots
      • Bots really made it, turned Slack into a marketable product (opened the platform, API)
    • But what happened to Google Wave and Google Buzz?
    • Is there a Slack-to-Email bridge? Maybe on Rocketchat
      • But who stores your chats? streams? e-mail?
    • Spammers on Slack? It's a closed environment, you know your spammer (unlike e-mail)
    • But there can be public "Talk to a sales rep" windows

• • Kik also opened their platform

• • Rocketchat - "Slack-alike"
    • web client & phone apps
    • e-mail gateway, LDAP gateway
    • Drag'n'drop filesharing
    • Self-hosted, on Ubuntu as a Snap
    • Self-hosted, so you have control over your own data
    • kwvoip.ca may set this up...

• • XMPP - Cisco bought Jabber.org
  • Matrix/Riot

• E-mail is so easy to use, people use it for everything
  • File storage
  • Instant messaging
  • Archival storage
  • Operating System?
    • Heard of people who use git as a mail repository

• Struggle with Exchange and Outlook
  • Weird problems, eg. indexes
  • Large systems are constrained only by the time and effort of the SysAdmin
    • Or sufficient funds to purchase vendor support
  • Would weird problems like indexing exist on Office365?

• Large mail providers silently drop some mail, receivers and senders have no idea it's not delivered

• Web clients
  • Horde
  • Squirrel Mail
  • RoundCube
  • Nextcloud mail app (based on Horde)

• • DMARC and DKIM
  • Smarthosts on ISPs

• Dealing with blocklists
  • Blocklists are reputation managers
  • Small orgs sending mail are incorrectly identified as spammers
  • Blocklist organizations have no incentive to lift blocks based on the requests of senders (otherwise every spammer would make that request)
  • Recipients of failed messages need to contact their mail providers to stop the mail providers from subscribing to bad blocklists

Spam mitigation

• Need to bring mail filtering inhouse
• Bayesian filters on content

• New legislation for mass-mail (starting 1 July 2017?)
  • Mailing lists? OK for non-commercial organizations that don't sell or solicit funds.
  • Fundraising? OK as long as there is a paragraph in the message that this is for fundraising.
• Filter provider needs to hold the spam for subsequent retraining