I believe I have discovered an important reason why the government has a hard time making good use of the Internet: people who design systems for the government abhor messy data. They are used to setups in which every record is complete because the people populating the records are forced by law or regulation to fill them out entirely. As we are learning on the web though, the best systems arise from rather messy data. Let’s say you are a marketplace site. Should you have a listing process th...

I believe I have discovered an important reason why the government has a hard time making good use of the Internet: people who design systems for the government abhor messy data. They are used to setups in which every record is complete because the people populating the records are forced by law or regulation to fill them out entirely. As we are learning on the web though, the best systems arise from rather messy data. Let’s say you are a marketplace site. Should you have a listing process th...

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...