Josh Currier

Blogging about stuff.

Archive for the ‘Email’ category

Why use Lotus Domino?

June 22nd, 2010

Why indeed! I’ve been a IBM/Lotus Notes/Domino user since 1997 and I’ve been doing Domino admin stuff for probably 7 or 8 years. I’ve always been comfortable with it so I’ve effectively been a proponent of it as well. Add to that, the companies I’ve worked for relied on the Domino platform for custom applications, which made it all worth it. Or did it? Have I been blindly supporting a heaping pile of bullshit? Yes, I’m afraid I have.

I recently attended Microsoft’s TechEd 2010 in New Orleans, Louisiana with two of my colleagues from overseas. During this trip I got a look at a lot of new stuff that Microsoft has to offer, and we had a lot of in-depth conversations about why we’re using the platforms we’re using, and why we shouldn’t be. Notes/Domino was a big part of these discussions. » Read more: Why use Lotus Domino?

No comments »

Posted in Email

Tags: domino exchange IBM lotus microsoft notes sharepoint

Outsourced SMTP – Good or Bad? – PostIni Outage?

October 13th, 2009

I’ve had some pressure from time to time, to outsource our SMTP gateway function. There are some legitimate reasons for doing this but there are also some fairly serious drawbacks as well. Right now it appears tha PostIni is suffering a significant outage and I can’t email Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart, I said. Just think about how many other enormous companies are being affected by this outage right now!

As I have resisted the pressure to outsource everything from backup storage to SMTP servers, we are not one of those companies stuck in the mud today. This does highlight one of the more serious drawbacks to having your SMTP outsourced. Yes they have redundant servers. Yes they have redundant networks. Yet somehow they are experiencing an outage. » Read more: Outsourced SMTP – Good or Bad? – PostIni Outage?

7 comments »

Posted in Email

SpamSentinel, whitelists, and paying attention.

September 7th, 2009

Since I’ve begun a trend of posting my bonehead moves on my blog for all to see, I figured I’d share this one as well. I’ve been a Maysoft SpamSentinel customer since 2005 and I’ve always been vocal with my praise when the topic of spam comes up. I especially love the focus on continued improvement. Backscatter? No problem, they just added that functionality to the product. They even snuck in a new feature recently that made a bonehead move on my part less spectacular. Here’s how that went…

Yesterday I noticed that there were zero messages in our B/C quarantines. I immediately sent a screenshot of the dashboard page to Chris Rich (who is so good at support that I’ve often considered referring to him as ‘Yoda’) to see if any recent update might be the cause of this change. He responded quickly, asking if the quarantines were also empty for the days shown by the dashboard page. I confirmed that this was the case and then started back-tracking everything I’d done this week, as I have a tendency to be the cause of many of my issues. » Read more: SpamSentinel, whitelists, and paying attention.