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
- 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
- Aren't we all on Slack by now?
- 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...
- Rocketchat - "Slack-alike"
- 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
