Acceptance Speech for the MAAWG.org Mary Litynski

I was honoured with the Mary Litynski award on June 09, 2011. Read about it here.

This is not the first award I've received from the MAAWG community. A few years ago, at a meeting in Washington, D.C., I received an honorary doctorate when recognized me as Dr. Evil. At the past meeting, at Disney, you honored me with a t-shirt branding me as Grumpy, from the Seven Dwarves.

As much as I treasure those memories, this award is very special to me.

Mary Lytinski was a warm, helpful, friendly person. It is nice to see that MAAWG is applying these criteria when deciding a suitable winner of the award in her name.

Seeing Mary at the registration desk was our opening ritual three times a year, and her greeting -- no matter how busy -- told every attendee that this was going to be a good meeting. Mary's contribution to our community and our cause cannot be measured.

I can’t begin to express my gratitude for this award, named in honor of our old friend; I am profoundly humbled, particularly when we consider the roster of others in our community undeniably as deserving of recognition.

My contributions to the Internet community, like that of so many others, began as a volunteer. To some, that might be a puzzling thing, to do something without financial recompense. To others, most in this room, it is the most natural thing of all.

There are a number of reasons why I try to embody a spirit of volunteerism. For one, my mother volunteered her time throughout her life. She undoubtedly passed this aspect on to me.

When I got online in 1992, the net was largely non-commercial. There was no world wide web. It was all about text, and community spirit, and volunteered contributions. Even when employees of a commercial entity worked on standards or software, it was with humility and a sense of collaboration, of building the Internet together.

The commercialization of the net has brought with it some astounding, wonderful new technologies and contributions to our global society. I am able to write to my friend, one of the happiest people I’ve ever met, a peasant girl named Shandy, who lives in rural China, because she has a Hotmail account. A far-flung community was able to express our love and support for our friend and colleague J.D. Falk, by way of Facebook, and email, and AOL Instant Messaging. Perhaps most profoundly, an offshoot of Google, 23andme, allowed me to reconcile with my biological mother, sister and brother, this past weekend after 50 years.

These are the things that motivate me to voluntarily advocate for the anti-abuse community. Because along with all these commercial offerings, there is still a fundamental, precious human element, a drawing together of the global village that criminals, if we let them, would rend asunder. There is still real, honest human communication -- that abusers sully. This human element is the magic intrinsic to the Internet, and something that must be protected. It isn’t just about email systems being spammed, and websites under ddos. It is what they represent -- the people, the data, and the ability to communicate -- that we strive to protect.

The DNA of the Internet, the vast majority of underlying technologies and protocols, were dreamt up and realized by volunteers. Grassroots, volunteer anti-abuse efforts such as my organization, CAUCE, many of the DNSBLs, discussion groups -- all manner of efforts to stave off the wolves at the door, nearly all done on a voluntary basis or as a contribution to the community.

And then there’s MAAWG.

While most of us are paid to be here, involvement in MAAWG can take up a tremendous amount of time. It often encroaches into one’s personal life, or one’s ability to accomplish the balance of our paid work, in effect, MAAWG is very much run by people volunteering of their time, expertise and brilliance.

And so, I accept this award on behalf of all the volunteers past, present and future, my peers and my betters, with the hopes that our work is properly honouring the person for whom this award is named, our dear departed Mary Litynski.

Ken Magill's alter-ego: "Stupid Poopyhead"

Would the real Slim Shady please stand up?

Ken Magill is Stupid Poopyhead!! That’s right! Magill gives a “Heath Ledger”-quality performance as the arch-villain in the newest movie (in my mind) about the wussiest of all super-heroes, Spamfighter.

Sitting in his spam-cave, Spamfighter has DNSBL, and WHOIS, and ARIN and rDNS lookups strapped tightly into his utility belt, with Spamfighter-boy at his side, and Spamfighter-girl knocking down his door for a booty-call when he should be prowling the darkened streets of Gotham, looking for evil-doers. Except his Mom won’t lend him the Spam-mobile tonight, and Magill has once again sent one of his infamous calling cards.

So here’s the thing: When Ken retired from writing about email to become the business editor of The New York Sun in 2003-2005, his time in Arkham Asylum as it were, and we thought we were done with him.

But no, he was biding his time, and took the nod from Eminem only to return to DM News to start his crime spree afresh! (Make note of the timing - do you really think it was accidentally coincident??)

Now this looks like a job for me
So everybody just follow me
'Cause we need a little controversy,
'Cause it feels so empty without me

Come to think of it, has anyone seen Slim and Ken in the same room at the same time? Talk about alter-egos!

Ken's latest crime? A screed called “You Ask for Garbage, You Get it” which actually should be the name of the rss feed for his column, not merely the title of the piece; Contained within is this devious bomblet:

“Double opt-in—I am purposely using this term rather than the others because it’s the one marketers use most and, more importantly, it drives anti-spammers nuts—is the one foolproof way to make sure e-mail addresses people use to sign up for a list are real and accurate.”

Woah! Magill is attempting to divert the good and the just from their appointed rounds by intentionally using wrong terms. My GOD! Are there no limits to depths to the evil insanity this villain will plumb? He must be brought to justice, and I’m just the man to do it!

Ken's crime is the one of conflation, one of using a too-broad a brush, nay, a roller, nay nay, a paint-gun to tar us all under the same rubric.

A cigar-chomping bit of nastiness, Ken likes to dive into the NANAE sewer and pull out a few ‘nuggets’, hold them up high and proclaim from the highest mountain tops “Look at this shit”.

Memo to Ken: You’ve got a piece of poo in your hand. Go wash up before dinner.

OK, enough of this overly drawn-out framing of this piece (forgive me, I had fun writing it).

Ken intentionally tweaks the nose of anti-spammers dropping the phrase ‘Double Opt-in’, in the midst of a wonderful piece on using that protocol to confirm subscriptions to email lists.

However, Ken fails to discriminate between various anti-spammers, lumping them all into the same pile. Sure, there are spittle-emitting community members like some found at NANAE, a slightly better grade of individual found at SPAM-l, and the denizens of Zorch, who are a couple of steps up from that.

I, for one, don't care what you call it, just do it, be it confirm or double your opt-in.

But this does beg the question ‘what is an anti-spammer’?

Without the efforts of hard-working volunteers and professionals who now lend their hand to ‘the fight’ against what is very much organized crime, there would be no email infrastructure upon which marketers could ply their trade, let alone one that can be used for one-to-one communications. Sure, some anti-spammers are jackasses, just as there are some marketers who are total dickweeds. But to attribute the fuckery of the one to the many is just plain wrong.

Responsible marketers should have, and do have the admittedly enlightened self-interest of fighting spam just as energetically and vociferously as the most angry, petulant, frothiest-of-mouthed card-carrying NANAE member. In a couple of weeks, the Messaging Anti-abuse Working Group, (the acronym for which my colleague and friend JD Falk rightly notes sounds like something Godzilla might emit: “MAAWG! MAAWG!”) will meet in Florida In September. Talk about selfless bravery – the midst of Hurricane season and we are meeting to talk about spam!

The group will be co-meeting with The Anti-spyware Coalition; the primary concern and focus of the meetings being botnets; bringing together investigators and technical experts from all over the world to coordinate efforts to put an end to this scourge. It brings them all into the same rooms as (gasp!) marketers. See for yourself who the members of MAAWG are.

No, MAAWG is not always the easiest of alliances, antis and marketers in the same rooms is sometimes a tense mating, but a necessary one nevertheless.

Bottom line: Everyone with a stake in email needs to ante up, stop the infighting and ... and ... "can't we all just get along??"

We must all be grateful for the efforts of spamfighters and actively support them. Adopt best practices in their totality, make donations to organizations like CAUCE.org (yes, I'm the Executive Director).

Without MAAWGers, and without the NANAEites and even without people who get all upset because Confirmed Opt-in is now, in popular nomenclature, "Double Opt-in", we’d all be sunk.

Ken old bean, you Stupid Poopyhead, without anti-spammers, even the obnoxious ones, you and I would be out of work. Well, you would, anyway.

By the way, I owe you a stogie for having stretched this framing an analogy far beyond reasonable limits, and tweaking your bulbous nasus repeatedly. Your piece on Confirmed Opt-in was a great one, which I will surely bookmark for future reference. It lays out the argument as to why marketers must implement it, and implement it now, in a coherent fashion and from a strong pro-marketing voice. But Ken, please, stop drawing lines between members of the email community, they only exacerbate deep divisions we must pave over if we are to be successful in staunching the flow of spam.

And thanks for the piece on COI/DOI. The Anti-spammers owe you major props.

MAAWG San Francisco

I'm sitting in a hotel waiting for sessions to start for the Messaging Anti-abuse Working Group to start later today. I've attended a couple of these previously, one in Montreal, the other last October in Toronto.

The funniest thing about MAAWG is that it is a confluence of people who look terribly uncomfortable in suits, and people who look way too comfortable in suits, geeks and marketers. And what a natural fit they are.

Here's some pretty pictures of buildings to hold you until I get pictures of geeks in suits.