Data Center operations mail list?

Sat Aug 22 01:46:00 UTC 2015

On Fri, Aug 21, 2015 at 08:18:59PM -0500, Rafael Possamai wrote:
> Quick update: I moved away from Amazon SES to a private smtp server
> provided by Chris, who is also helping moderate the list.

That's a good idea.  I noticed.

> I left Amazon SES configured as a backup since the bounce rate after
> thousands of emails peaked at only 0.08%

The bounce rate is not an effective metric, for a number of reasons, not
the least of which is that some unknown and unknowable number of sites
are configured to quarantine email.  (This is a horrible idea that I've
railed against many times, but that notwithstanding, ignorant people do it
every day.)  Any site which quarantines mail will not generate a bounce
(or a reject) but will silently consign incoming traffic to a location
which may, or may not, be eventually seen by a human being.

The bounce rate yields precisely zero insight into the extent of this
problem.  Nor does it yield any insight into other similar (related)
problems which are not manifested via the SMTP transaction.

The best course here is to completely avoid any contact with the
horribly-mismanaged Amazon cloud operation until such time as those
running it demonstrate a bare minimum of professionalism -- which,
to date, they have unfortunately not.  In this particular case, it
would be preferable to defer/queue any outbound mail traffic instead of
attempting to deliver via Amazon: there is unlikely to be anything
traversing that mailing list which would suffer by being delayed
by an hour or a day.

---rsk