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How to find headers in Gmail
Ever received an email at your Gmail address that seemed fishy? Or needed to trace where a message truly originated? Do you want to give an abuse desk all of the information that they need in order to enforce their anti-spam policy? Then you want to get the email headers. These technical-looking details unlock valuable Read More
![a white paper in a vintage typewriter](https://i0.wp.com/www.spamtacular.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/pexels-photo-4052195.jpeg?resize=750%2C379&ssl=1)
So… (an update)
Where have I been? It’s a legitimate question. The short answer is that I’ve been busy. Very busy. My last post was in September of 2021, but if you go back a little further, you’ll find this post where I talk about applying to law school. Well, I made it in. I’ve been attending law Read More
![man and woman in brown leather coat standing on brown soil](https://i0.wp.com/www.spamtacular.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/pexels-photo-984946.jpeg?resize=750%2C379&ssl=1)
What does your relationship look like?
Delivering mail successfully is a full-time job for a lot of people. My full-time job is handling complaints about the mail. What do those complaints look like? Well, they fall into a few different buckets: Please unsubscribe me. This is spam. “I’ve asked to be removed from your customer’s list and they just refuse.” “Your Read More
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Policy at scale: Policy is relative
Telling stories is a dangerous thing in my line of work. But, work cannot get done without telling stories. On the one hand, you want the story to be accurate, but several really legitimate considerations mean that you can’t be so precise as to allow others to determine who is being referred to. If you Read More
![portrait of young woman](https://i0.wp.com/www.spamtacular.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/pexels-photo-3958798.jpeg?resize=750%2C379&ssl=1)
What is opt-in?
Like all other reputable email service providers, my employer has an opt-in based anti-spam policy. This sometimes brings up a question about what qualifies as permissible consent under our policy. While we definitely believe that our policy is clear enough, a few weeks ago, I decided to break down some ideas about permission, consent, and Read More
![Lost](https://i0.wp.com/www.spamtacular.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/57e2d54b485aaf14f1dc8460962a3f7f1d37d8f85254784a71297bd39e4f_640_lost.jpg?resize=640%2C379&ssl=1)
I’m still here…
An apology: I haven’t forgotten about the blog, and really haven’t neglected things so much as I’ve been super busy. Since my last post, I have: Overseen the transition of our team’s ticketing queue from one platform to another. Applied to the University of Houston Law Center’s part-time/evening program. (The next time that you are Read More
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Policy at scale: What makes an actionable complaint?
Here’s something you may not know about abuse desks: they’re busy. The further up the “food chain” you get, the smaller the relative number of complaints you’ll see, but almost any abuse desk will receive at least several thousand complaints per year. Dealing with complaints, then, is somewhat art and somewhat science. There are questions Read More
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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, Read More
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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 Read More
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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 Read More