It has been great for startups to be able to fire up instances on Amazon EC2 or Slicehost for next to nothing, but one thing that has gone down the drain in doing so is email deliverability. I try out a lot of new services all the time and at this point I would say that well over half of those new services don’t get their email messages into my inbox. Instead they get swallowed up by Postini. And because Postini is generally excellent (very few false positives), I rarely bother to check it. T...

It has been great for startups to be able to fire up instances on Amazon EC2 or Slicehost for next to nothing, but one thing that has gone down the drain in doing so is email deliverability. I try out a lot of new services all the time and at this point I would say that well over half of those new services don’t get their email messages into my inbox. Instead they get swallowed up by Postini. And because Postini is generally excellent (very few false positives), I rarely bother to check it. T...

More and more ISPs block port 25 and it’s a pain to begin with to figure out which smtp server to use, especially on a laptop that’s moving around a lot. Initially I had configured Susan’s machine to send via gmail, but despite having her DailyLit email address in the “send as” account configuration, when connecting via SMTP gmail sent all the mail as coming from her gmail account. So last night I signed her up for AuthSMTP. It took all of 10 minutes to pay, add her email address and then con...

More and more ISPs block port 25 and it’s a pain to begin with to figure out which smtp server to use, especially on a laptop that’s moving around a lot. Initially I had configured Susan’s machine to send via gmail, but despite having her DailyLit email address in the “send as” account configuration, when connecting via SMTP gmail sent all the mail as coming from her gmail account. So last night I signed her up for AuthSMTP. It took all of 10 minutes to pay, add her email address and then con...

I have been reading Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody." While I was cringing through the chapter on organizations and transaction costs (which manages to ignore the 70 years of economics of the firm that followed Coase’s paper), I loved the chapters on how personal web publishing is changing the very nature of journalism. In those chapters is a real nugget in a section titled "Fame Happens." Clay gives a great definition of fame as occuring when inbound attention exceeds the ability to...

I have been reading Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody." While I was cringing through the chapter on organizations and transaction costs (which manages to ignore the 70 years of economics of the firm that followed Coase’s paper), I loved the chapters on how personal web publishing is changing the very nature of journalism. In those chapters is a real nugget in a section titled "Fame Happens." Clay gives a great definition of fame as occuring when inbound attention exceeds the ability to...