lab188

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

CSS Advisor launched at macromedia/Adobe

The CSS Advisor launches at the Dreamweaver Developer Center at adobe.com

Since Dreamweaver 8 launched, macromedia/adobe has pushed CSS to a more visible level in the Dreamweaver Developer Center. The most recent addition is the CSS Advisor.

The Advisor is meant to be a community driven CSS resource for dealing with pesky bugs, advanced approaches to CSS, and a place to contribute. Adobe implemented tagging for the forum, allowing us to look for a solution by keyword. Adobe also turned on commenting, allowing us lurkers to test and judge the various fixes and solutions by comparing everyone’s experience.

This certainly has promise, and it certainly minimizes the ever-popular Google search for fixes. And typically, a Google search for CSS issues is a shot in the dark, as describing a CSS problem with keywords is an exercise in semantics. The Advisor may build an audience with CSS smarts, Dreamweaver background, and a desire to share experiences. And they’ve added a feed, so a quick glance with a feedreader will keep you in the loop without having to visit.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Email is dead

Email is dead, done in by spammers, overly cautious spam filters, ISPs trying to stem the tide, and too much HTML formatted email

Other people have declared it so already, and I’m throwing in the towel as well. Email is dead as a communication tool. Spammers, and the people clicking through the links they send, have made email almost useless and way too time-consuming.

Several events recently came together to convince me. One of the companies I host with moved to a new architecture recently. Along with that came a change in the processing of mail and the marking of potential spam. I had left the filter settings at the suggested level, and found that most email newsletters that were handled by a third party became spammy. An email message contains the sender address and a reply-to address. If they differ, the filtering algorithms used by the spam filters tag them as spam. “Legitimate” email shows a matching sender and reply-to. Therefore, a newsletter sent by an email newsletter service gets thrown in the “Junk” section of the inbox, along with the other 200 pieces of spam arriving daily.

At some point, the time required to sort out the good and bad becomes too wasteful and onerous, and the newsletters get deleted along with the rest of the junk. HTML formatted email also gets labeled as junk. I’ve looked at the code and the headers at some of this mail and the message seems to be generated by a content management system that writes xml tags or just plain poor HTML that is tagged by the filters as spam. One of my senders apparently generates mail from different systems, used by different people, and from different servers. Mail from this organization may get tagged as spam or not, depending on the originating email server and the generating program. Then the third quarter of 2006 arrived.

All of the services I have accounts with reported a large uptick in the amount of spam in the third quarter of 2006. The ISPs started to tighten their incoming spam filters, and blacklist any IP coming from a server they identify as a source of spam. So, one of my providers, media temple, is continually tagged as a spam source by Comcast’s email servers. When I reply to a message from a Comcast customer, the message bounces, with a cheery reply from Comcast’s servers that my IP is blacklisted, and that I need to contact my ISP to have them contact Comcast to get off the blacklist.

This happens every time I reply to mail coming from Comcast’s servers. This in turn generates a trouble ticket for media temple. Their email admins contact Comcast’s email admins to remove the block and all is well until the next message from by buddy Lou, who uses Comcast. This is getting to be a problem, and I am usually a very patient person. And the patience level is wearing down.

All of this goes back to the spammers, and more importantly, the people clicking those links in the spam they receive. As long as *someone* clicks through those links in the spam, we’ll have spam. It is just too easy to make money by sending eleventy zillion emails and getting a 1% or less response, which is enough to make money for the spammers and their customers.

I’d like to have a solution. RSS is the closest possible solution for content such as email newsletters, but the convenience factor in email is hard to overcome. It’s the push versus pull, and as a consumer, it is easier to sit back and wait for content to be pushed to me.

If you have a solution, don’t email it. You know what will happen.