About Red Pill Email
Wikipedia describes the terms blue pill and red pill as a popular metaphor for the choice between blissful ignorance (blue) and embracing the sometimes painful truth (red).
I was working with a company that was a little outside it’s core competency with an in-house email system built from the ground up. I’m not talkin’ MTA ground up, I’m talking “at the pipe” ground-up, and without the distraction of ever having heard of an RFC document.
Now since it’s not always easy to convince a company that’s making millions of dollars a year with a junk email system that they’d make a lot more money with commercial tools, sometimes the only thing that you can do is try to make improvements.
A good place to start making improvements is something that’s going to provide you with some sort of business or operations intelligence. Since this company was using some tinker-toy software to “handle” bounces, one project was to replace the incumbent “bounce counter” with something a bit more intelligent that might actually log events with reasons for return.
So I’m in this meeting with a programmer, a DBA, a Project Manager, and maybe a couple of others. We’re talking about all kinds of cool stuff, like RFC docs (go figure), and how all of the parts need to work together to obtain the desired results.
Since this was going to be a big project – need to read RFC docs and everything – the anticipated questioning for justification of all of this work soon began. I’m not quite sure what they expected, but we covered everything from what it needs to do to why it needs to do it to what impact on business not doing it could have.
As the Project Manager and I were walking out of the meeting, he turned to me, smiled and said, I wish I would have taken the blue pill…. I was happy not knowing what I didn’t know.
That sounded like a good name for a blog site, so here we are.
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