When spam is not spam

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Posted in E-Commerce on March 24, 2008 at 9:39 am

We used to employ a system of automatically rejecting blacklisted incoming email senders. To do this we relied on services such as xBL. The problem we found was that from time to time genuine companies would, for one reason or another, find themselves on these blacklist sites and, even worse, they were not always aware of it. We found this out the hard way because we didn’t process (or deliver) several orders that were contained upon these incoming emails (Managing Incoming Email)- a hard lesson by any standard.

Of course in the ‘old days’ customer orders used to come in physically on paper but these days many are coming in solely via e-mail. I used to advise against this delivery mechanism for something as important as orders using the point that e-mail is not a guaranteed (or reliable) delivery mechanism. As time progressed though, customer requirements demanded that we accept these communications and it’s hard to argue against it when customer orders are at stake. One thing I have found more of recently is that genuine customer orders on incoming e-mail are starting to show up as potential spam. Again, we typically used to reject spam senders but it now looks as if we have to manually trawl through these - and as we get hit with thousands of these e-mails per day the task is rapidly becoming quite time consuming (Guess What … SPAM is on the increase).

We did try white listing certain supplier domains in the early days and configure our systems not to stop these communications in the hope that we might get a good stab at dealing with these problems but it didn’t take long for interesting post-cards, executables and screen savers to start getting picked up on other internal systems. Informing customers that we really don’t appreciate these things being sent to our staff is not a great way of maintaining a supplier/customer relationship and so we are regularly looking for other ways of dealing with these problems. It still surprises me that some large corporations seemingly allow their staff to have these sort of things on their computers and even more that they allow their staff to send them to trading partners using e-mail.

It seems we want to have the cake AND eat it. We want protection against spam but we also don’t want to miss genuine e-mails that may get flagged as spam. We don’t want e-mails from blacklisted senders but we don’t want to reject genuine orders either. We get ten times more spam than we did last year and no doubt next year the current figures will look like small fry in comparison.

What is the best way of dealing with incoming spam and blacklisted senders whilst also ensuring that valuable trading partner information doesn’t get rejected at the gateway?

Related Post: Sex, Drugs and the Spam Patrol

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Lessons in making a multi-lingual website

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Posted in Programming, Languages, Internet, E-Commerce on November 23, 2007 at 4:57 pm

I confess - I only speak one language (excluding programming languages of course!). Some people might even tell you I have difficulty with this one. However, I was still asked to work on the technical angle of converting a website to a multi-lingual website - to include French and German language variations. The actual “language” side would be handled by someone else - phew I thought, oh and apparently the project would be a breeze. Now, the older I get the more worried I look when people tell me things are going to be a breeze because more often than not they aren’t. This was to become no exception.

Finding a translator was simple enough, our local chamber of commerce were very helpful in this respect. I was a little concerned when there was no project meeting, discussion or even email communication to lay out the requirement but as the “language” side was being handled by someone else I was not too concerned. As long as I received the text then the technical implementation should be quite straightforward.

It took just over a week for me to prepare a notepad file full of text to send to the translators but then a number of Word files arrived via email and to my surprise the job was declared complete. It seems the translators and the person handling the “language” side had decided to approach the translation by saving pages from the website into Word and translate them directly. “Now all you have to do is load them up on the web server and you’re set”. No, I’m sorry I reply - but we are far from “set”. You see the website is dynamically loaded and uses ASP with HTML templates and the content can change following a browser refresh (and some during an image or link hover). In addition, a large amount of text is saved as images to ensure that it is consistent - the translating people didn’t do any translation of image and left them the way they were – ouch.

I still managed to muddle through the French version but the German version had a bunch of missing text which turned out that someone had marked portions of it as hidden text in Word - by default Word doesn’t appear to show hidden text. After several dozen emails back and forth we discovered the problem (by accident as it turns out) but the delays were still there. As I was preparing the notepad file which eventually never got used I also realised something quite important. Certain phrases don’t translate very well and the impact (and sometimes even the meaning) of words and phrases can be lost and even worse much of the content is aimed at the UK market and so refers very much to the UK and to UK guidance and regulations. Of what value, interest or use this might be to someone in France or Germany - I am left to wonder!

So what is the moral of the story? If someone comes along with a job and tells you it’s going to be a breeze - look busy, for heavens sake, look busy.

Jason Slater in Reader

When spam is not spam

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Lessons in making a multi-lingual website

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