Data Center operations mail list?

[nanog at ics-il.net (Mike Hammett)]

I'm on a mailing list hosted at Amazon, uses their API, etc. Other than the bumps in the migration to Amazon, I haven't seen any real issues. Hundreds of people on the list posting hundreds (total, not each) of messages per day. No complaints. *shrugs* 




----- 
Mike Hammett 
Intelligent Computing Solutions 
http://www.ics-il.com 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Rich Kulawiec" <rsk at gsp.org> 
To: "Rafael Possamai" <rafael at gav.ufsc.br> 
Cc: nanog at nanog.org 
Sent: Friday, August 21, 2015 8:46:00 PM 
Subject: Re: Data Center operations mail list? 

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