Policy at scale: What makes an actionable complaint?
Here’s something that you may not know about abuse desks: they’re busy. The further up the “food chain” that you get, the smaller the relative number of complaints that you’ll see, but almost any abuse desk is going to be dealing in at least several thousands of complaints per year. Dealing with complaints, then, is…
Policy at scale: Figuring reputational damage
How important is policy? Policy not only reflects and is a product of reality. Policies are created as a reflection of what a company wants to do and how it will pursue its business. For some companies, that means “we will try to get away with doing no more than the law requires.” For others,…
Policy Practicum: COVID-19
How does general policy change in the face of a known health emergency? It’s a really tough question that can be fraught with pitfalls and emotions. So, this will be the very first of an intermittent series of posts covering the policy implications of things happening in real life. First, a disclaimer I feel the…
Policy at scale: It both is and is not about the customer
There’s an old quote sometimes (mis)attributed to Stalin: “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic” (Wikiquote contributors 2020). The same thing holds true when it comes to policy enforcement: A single customer can be watched carefully but hundreds or thousands of customers fall to statistics. Mass detection…
Policy at scale: The purpose of a policy is protection
The purpose of a written policy is to protect the provider by protecting the customer. Stated policies — especially in written form — provide a baseline of expected behavior that other people on the Internet can look toward. So, customers, prospects, recipients, and other providers are able to see what standards apply to the use…
Policy at scale: Understanding the issue
One of the more difficult things to consider is how policies scale when you are talking about sending millions or billions of messages per day. But, being able to scale your policies to go along with your business is an important consideration. I generally operate with a rule of thumb that any direct complaint (where…
Tulsi Gabbard performs a public service
5 March 2020
Back in August of 2019, the Tulsi Gabbard campaign (“Tulsi Now, Inc.”) sued Google after Google temporarily suspended the campaign’s Adwords account after the first Democratic Presidential Candidate Debates (Marinucci & Strauss, 2019). Earlier this week, in a move that should have surprised absolutely no one, the judge in the case threw out the lawsuit…
Policy exists for business reasons
2 March 2020
We live in a politically polarized world. Everyone wants exactly what they want and will only take it exactly as they would like it. You only need to look at the 2020 US Elections to see that. The New York Times has a wonderful example of that from the left: The movement’s identity is based…
How to handle spamtraps
27 February 2020
So, you’ve discovered that your customer has an issue with spamtraps on a mailing list. What do you do now? As a rule, spamtraps end up on a list due to problems with permission or hygiene. No, that’s not exclusive of other things, nor is it necessarily an indication that policies have been violated. But,…
Spamtraps are not the problem
24 February 2020
When you go to the doctor, do you want the doctor to treat your symptoms or do you want the doctor to give you treatment for the disease that is causing the symptoms? If you’re like most people, the answer will be “I want the doctor to treat the disease.” In my line of work,…