Mail Management/Meeting Notes 2017-07-17

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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


Meeting Notes

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 whatever happened to Google Wave and Google Buzz?
    • Is there a Slack-to-Email bridge? Maybe on Rocket.Chat
      • Privacy and datamanagment concerns: 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
  • Rocket.Chat - "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.com (now Cisco Jabber)
  • Matrix / Riot
Ease-of-Use

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
Difficulty-of-Admin
  • Struggle with Exchange and Outlook
    • Weird problems, eg. indexes
    • Would weird problems like indexing exist on Office365?
  • Large systems are constrained only by the time and effort of the SysAdmin
    • Or sufficient funds to purchase vendor support
Spam Mitigation
  • Large mail providers silently drop some mail, receivers and senders have no idea it's not delivered
  • Need to bring mail filtering inhouse
    • Opinion that the only effective filters are Bayesian filters on content, not geo-blocks, IP-blocks, or domainname-blocks
  • DMARC and DKIM (both broken for mailing list use)
  • Dealing with blocklists
    • Blocklists are reputation managers
    • Small orgs sending mail are incorrectly identified as spammers
    • Blocklist providers 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
    • Filter provider needs to hold the spam for subsequent retraining (problems with privacy and data control)
  • Organizations block access to external mail providers


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