Email is dead. Granted, this is neither a new or original observation. But, it was reinforced this morning as I spent a couple of hours troubleshooting an email problem.
Many of our sites have automated email features. Emails get fired off to site owners with user feedback and other information; emails get sent to us, the developers, when things go wrong; and emails go to users when the sign up, forget their password, or have other issues. But, as usual, spam gets in the way. It turns out the "from" address I was using had a word in it (no, nothing bad) that tripped up our spam filter. The filter is a pretty simple one...it just does wild-card matching. So, all of the messages sent from this particular site (and I'd imagine a number of others) went straight to dev/null (non-geek translation: they were erased). Of course, these messages just died quietly, without any indication that something went wrong.
One of the solutions is, of course, a better filter. We managed to work around our issue this morning, and eventually we'll upgrade our filter.
The other solution, I'm coming to realize, is RSS. Lots of those automated messages could have been handled by RSS. The error messages could be an RSS feed, as could the user feedback messages. We'll probably still need to send the "forgot your password" messages and other user-specific communication using email. Granted, using RSS does require some additional infrastructure. The error messages would need to be captured (probably to database) and the RSS feed would need constructing. Given that RSS is fairly simple, we're taking a couple of hours of work to set up a system, I think. But, once a system is in place once, it'd be trivial to make new feeds. The other piece of the equation is the RSS reader. I have mine (NetNewsWire) running all the time. But others don't, and they'd have get used to using a new communications tool (granted, they'd see all kinds of other benefits from this...).
(If you're new to RSS, check out the RSS section of my weblog and rss resources page.)
Posted by Karl
December 23, 2003 11:42 AM