An hour is short enough that in most cases, users will not notice the delay.
I'm wondering how I'm going to explain that to a new customer over the phone who says "I'll just email that file right now so we can go over it together".
Agreed. I've been involed in operating a larger (hundreds of thousands of active users) mail system a couple of years ago, and users would complain if their mail took more than seconds. We had to upgrade our system at one point because rapid growth had made mail delivery take a couple of minutes on average, and it caused bad publicity - a lot of users had a clear expectation that e-mail should be delivered in a few seconds and that if it didn't something was wrong.
I think changing that perception of e-mail as near instant will be incredibly hard. And if you succeed it will just move even more traffic over to the IM networks and cause spamming of IM networks to escalate instead.
No one said there wasn't room for improvement.
A nice little cgi where you can put in the senders email address as a short-lived whitelist would probably work pretty well.
I'm wondering how I'm going to explain that to a new customer over the phone who says "I'll just email that file right now so we can go over it together".
SMTP stands for Simple MAIL transfer protocol.
FTP stands for FILE transfer protocol.
Explain this to your user. You can just tell them that to send you a file they need to goto ftp://uploads.yourdomain.com (Where you have an unreadable but uploadable directory) in internet explorer, then they just need to drag the file into the browser and IE upload
This doesn't stop the attachments from going through. This only delays them. For those gotta be there now attachments you should be using something that is meant to be more reliable than SMTP anyways.
Just because themajority of people does something incorrectly doesn't mean it's suddenly the correct way to do it.
Saddly, you have missed the central point about the necessity of timeliness of email delivery and instead focused on using FTP rather than attachments.
Even if FTP were a solution, it does nothing to answer a new customer who says "I just heard about you and I'm excited about your products. Wanted to call and ask you some questions. I sent an email about 10 minutes ago with an outline of the project we're doing were you guys could really help out, have you had a chance to look it over yet".
There's a limitless number of these important common customer relationship scenarios, where the expectation of all parties involved is that email is delivered in under 1 minute and typically 5-10 seconds. And there are an infinite number of scenarios other than sales and customer service/relations where people quite reasonably expect email to be delivered in seconds.
Focusing on using FTP isn't just the wrong answer, it's not even an answer at all to the problem of email delivery taking an order of magnitude longer than users expect and depend upon.
But as others have pointed out, most users don't have access to FTP servers to receive files. Most corporate firewalls would prohibit users from setting up a FTP server. I would guess that almost any employee behind a corporate firewall wanting to somehow receive a file from a new customer via FTP who attempted to ask a sysadmin would get the answer "just have them send it as an attachment". FTP is simply not a viable protocol for customers and salespeople (or most others) to use to pass files back and forth.
Aside from not solving the unacceptable delay and the inappropriateness of using FTP, there is the problem of bad attitude. Specifically:
Explain this to your
user. You can just tell them that... [snip]
Where did "new customer" turn into "user". The word "user" in this context is often spoken in the tone of an overworked, grumpy sysadmin who's personal view of his priorities are decoupled from the larger organization's mission (usually taking care of customers, selling products, operating efficiently, and so on).
In this particular example, what is important is that the new customer whats to talk with someone about solving his problems. That someone is me, and I want to impress him, sell him something that will truely meet his needs, and hopefully turn him from "new customer" into "repeat customer" or even "loyal customer". THAT is what is important, and getting the customer's file quickly and easily with minimal hassle is merely a tool that enables the truely important work to happen.
Not having the email for 1 hour means I'll either have to call him back in an hour, while he probably calls some competitors and shops around. Often times people will buy from the first friendly, knowledgable person who goes to some effort to help them.... searching until they find that person/company. Delaying response to a new customer by 1 hours would put me at a competitive disadvantage.
Or we'll have to proceed without it (FTP is not an option), leading to frustration as he explains material that would have been much better delivered as a file. Maybe it would go ok, maybe not. But it's starting the whole process "on the wrong foot".
Then again, if your business is being a grumpy sysadmin where you have (captive) "users" rather than "customers", maybe delaying new email conversations is a big advantage which is not offset by any impact in "responsiveness" because it's already intentionally low.
With a small modification to this system you can accomodate most of the situations in which mail needs to be instantaneous. Most companies already have more than one mail server. Use one set of mail servers for internal mail, these servers wouldn't greylist and wouldn't be resolvable by dns (dhcp perhapps). Thus the important email from the ceo goes through the internal mail server and is routed to your mail program. If you have someone outside who must contact you give them the current ip of the interna
Agreed. I read that, and I immediately realised the author was smoking something a lot stronger than crack. What does he think email is, the US Postal Service?
Thirty seconds would be noticeable, but possibly acceptable. An hour is right out.
When I read the term greylisting, it made me think of something else... it made me think of an MTA that scores the MTA on the other end on a scale of spam-likelihood based on several otherwise unrelated criteria. Certainly, whether the MTA has sent a message with the same
"Well hello there Charlie Brown, you blockhead."
-- Lucy Van Pelt
Delaying email by one hour! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm wondering how I'm going to explain that to a new customer over the phone who says "I'll just email that file right now so we can go over it together".
Re:Delaying email by one hour! (Score:5, Insightful)
I think changing that perception of e-mail as near instant will be incredibly hard. And if you succeed it will just move even more traffic over to the IM networks and cause spamming of IM networks to escalate instead.
Re:Delaying email by one hour! (Score:1)
Re:Delaying email by one hour! (Score:2)
SMTP stands for Simple MAIL transfer protocol.
FTP stands for FILE transfer protocol.
Explain this to your user. You can just tell them that to send you a file they need to goto ftp://uploads.yourdomain.com (Where you have an unreadable but uploadable directory) in internet explorer, then they just need to drag the file into the browser and IE upload
Re:Delaying email by one hour! (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because themajority of people does something incorrectly doesn't mean it's suddenly the correct way to do it.
Re:Delaying email by one hour! (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if FTP were a solution, it does nothing to answer a new customer who says "I just heard about you and I'm excited about your products. Wanted to call and ask you some questions. I sent an email about 10 minutes ago with an outline of the project we're doing were you guys could really help out, have you had a chance to look it over yet".
There's a limitless number of these important common customer relationship scenarios, where the expectation of all parties involved is that email is delivered in under 1 minute and typically 5-10 seconds. And there are an infinite number of scenarios other than sales and customer service/relations where people quite reasonably expect email to be delivered in seconds.
Focusing on using FTP isn't just the wrong answer, it's not even an answer at all to the problem of email delivery taking an order of magnitude longer than users expect and depend upon.
But as others have pointed out, most users don't have access to FTP servers to receive files. Most corporate firewalls would prohibit users from setting up a FTP server. I would guess that almost any employee behind a corporate firewall wanting to somehow receive a file from a new customer via FTP who attempted to ask a sysadmin would get the answer "just have them send it as an attachment". FTP is simply not a viable protocol for customers and salespeople (or most others) to use to pass files back and forth.
Aside from not solving the unacceptable delay and the inappropriateness of using FTP, there is the problem of bad attitude. Specifically:
Where did "new customer" turn into "user". The word "user" in this context is often spoken in the tone of an overworked, grumpy sysadmin who's personal view of his priorities are decoupled from the larger organization's mission (usually taking care of customers, selling products, operating efficiently, and so on).
In this particular example, what is important is that the new customer whats to talk with someone about solving his problems. That someone is me, and I want to impress him, sell him something that will truely meet his needs, and hopefully turn him from "new customer" into "repeat customer" or even "loyal customer". THAT is what is important, and getting the customer's file quickly and easily with minimal hassle is merely a tool that enables the truely important work to happen.
Not having the email for 1 hour means I'll either have to call him back in an hour, while he probably calls some competitors and shops around. Often times people will buy from the first friendly, knowledgable person who goes to some effort to help them.... searching until they find that person/company. Delaying response to a new customer by 1 hours would put me at a competitive disadvantage.
Or we'll have to proceed without it (FTP is not an option), leading to frustration as he explains material that would have been much better delivered as a file. Maybe it would go ok, maybe not. But it's starting the whole process "on the wrong foot".
Then again, if your business is being a grumpy sysadmin where you have (captive) "users" rather than "customers", maybe delaying new email conversations is a big advantage which is not offset by any impact in "responsiveness" because it's already intentionally low.
Re:Delaying email by one hour! (Score:1)
Re:Delaying email by one hour! (Score:1)
Re:Delaying email by one hour! (Score:1)
smoking something a lot stronger than crack. What does he think
email is, the US Postal Service?
Thirty seconds would be noticeable, but possibly acceptable.
An hour is right out.
When I read the term greylisting, it made me think of something
else... it made me think of an MTA that scores the MTA on the
other end on a scale of spam-likelihood based on several otherwise
unrelated criteria. Certainly, whether the MTA has sent a message
with the same