A Welcome from KAM [A Hybrid Session]

Kevin A McGrail 0:00
My name is KAM also known as Kevin A McGrail but most people in the email industry just know me as KAM, it is my pleasure to welcome the community of inbox experts and email experts to the third Inbox Expo 2021 sponsored by SparkPost. And in Valencia, Spain, I am very sad that I cannot be in Valencia Spain right now I am coming to you from the East Coast in the United States, where it is currently about the zero degrees Celsius. And I would much rather be in sunny Spain right now. But I saw there’s people from all over the world. I saw Malta, I saw London I saw Israel, etcetera. And you know, just you know. So good morning, good afternoon. Good evening to everybody who’s joining here because my job today is to really get you guys excited about Inbox Expo, we want to make sure the community of emailexperts is really just you know, operating a top notch. And that’s my job here. So today I want to talk to you about the greatest keynote in the world. And before I do that, though, what I’ve really got to do is I’ve got to give some things so this event today would not be going off without some really really hard work to keep people Nely and Andrew Bonar. So please give them applause. I don’t know if I’ll hear it. But you know, they deserve every bit of the thanks. I hope if you see them at the event, you get a chance to tell them thank you. If you’re online, you get a chance to tell them just thanks for pulling this off. Additionally, you know, really Oh, thanks to our three platinum sponsors. So, you know, really couldn’t do this without, you know, SparkPost, Spotler and Netcore. Everybody I think is at the event today except for Netcore. So I hope you get a chance to stop by and thank them as well as well as all the sponsors who make these types of events possible. Additionally, you know, quite an a luminary for the technical world Wozniak, Steve Wozniak was, was instrumental in getting the word out about Inbox Expo and a lot of people joined because of him. Today, we have so many people streaming hybrid, we have dozens of people on site in Valencia, Spain. And it’s really a pleasure of mine to be coming in. And doing this hybrid. I can’t wait until these are face to face again. But in the meantime, such a great opportunity to have people from all over the world sharing and building this community. But you know, I think this event is dedicated to Ray Tomlinson. For those who are not familiar with Ray 50 years ago, on October 29, Ray sent the first email he was involved with the team that invented email, and the first email sent was QWERTYUIOP, the first row of a standard keyboard. And, you know, so if you see that hashtag or whatnot, rest in peace Ray. But, you know, we all owe a great a bit of gratitude to him and the others that helps make inbox inboxes possible. So additionally, you know, really couldn’t be here without all the people here, all the attendees virtually and in and in person, you know, couldn’t do it without you. But the last person I want to thank today is Monty Munford. Now, most people perhaps with the exception of Benny, who are watching this keynote, we’re probably going who is Monty Munford. So Monty Munford is actually the person who gave the greatest keynote I’ve ever seen. And Monty, you know, you knew when the second you walked into the room that Monty was going to be the keynote speaker, because he was up on stage, he’s wearing black and yellow checked pants, and he was ready to make a statement. I on the other hand, I’m here I’m wearing my Apache Software Foundation, hockey shirt, very proud to be a member. And maybe I’m wearing pants, maybe I’m not, you know, that’s the benefit of being virtual. But you know, I don’t have black and yellow check pants online. Additionally, the reason it was the greatest keynote in the world is because he brought it back to community, which is what we’re here for today. What you know he did that day is he got up on stage, he was doing a keynote, about how blockchain was really going to change the world. And he had an hour for his keynote, I only have a few minutes of your time, I

Kevin A McGrail 4:11
hope you will, you know, allow it for me. But, you know, during that keynote, he spent the first 20 minutes talking about his Bollywood career, you can find him on IMDb, this is actually the picture of him. But in the words of Tenacious D, today’s keynote is just a tribute to that. But you know, after that he spent about 20 minutes getting his audio working so he could play us the trailer, where he has about three and a half seconds in the trailer. And then he closed the keynote on blockchain by basically saying blockchains the thing that’s going to change the world. And for the next three days, everybody at that conference, talked about that keynote, and it brought us together and made us laugh. It made us not know anything about blockchain. But we were together as a community laughing together and I hope that my keynote It can do something similar can build some immunity, because I’m going to tell you some sad stories, some funny stories, and I want to hear some of yours over on chat. But a little bit more about me. So Kevin, a McGrail is my name, I go by KAM. That is not a photoshopped picture, by the way, that is actually an off brand Canadian spam called KAM. So I really feel I was born to work in the anti spam world. My day job I work at Dito where we secure, migrate and manage the cloud for people, especially on Google. But additionally, I’m also a member of the Apache Software Foundation. I’m the chair emeritus at the Apache SpamAssassin project and have given a lot of years to that. I’m also the principal author of the KAM rule said, I’m a Google workspace top contributor, Google Developer, expert and Ambassador. I’m also a member of the US Cyber CORPS for the Marine Corps. And I’m a distinguished senior fellow at Thomas University in cybersecurity. But what I am not is I am not in any Bollywood films, however, I am on LinkedIn. I love talking to people who work on email work on inboxes battle spammers battle fishers work in cybersecurity, etc. Or just want to say hi from around the world. So please reach out to me on LinkedIn, say hi, you’ll notice my avatar up there we’ll have that can have KAM spam, and you’ll be able to find me quite easily. So however, you know a little bit more about me and my email journey I thought would be funny, I thought we’d start off with a little bit about how I got started in email how I got started with the Apache SpamAssassin project, and kind of end with my goal for this conference. So my personal goal just to be clear, so how I got involved in anti spam really starts with my first video game, my favorite video game, my favorite video game is zero inbox. And for anybody who plays that video game along with me, you probably know you don’t win it very often, my inbox kind of becomes my to do list, it gets filled up with lots of things, I keep them in there, I try and, you know, snooze, some of them, I try and put them into notes, I try and groom them and whatnot. But it’s a never in never ending onslaught of emails every single minute of every single day for the most part. But when I got involved with anti spam started with the fact that I began an ISP in 1996. In 1997, around Thanksgiving, in the United States, and I’ll talk about that a little bit more, I noticed something very interesting. Now, for those who don’t know, Thanksgiving is a pretty major holiday in the United States, you spend it with your families, most businesses are closed, it’s a pretty big deal. But it’s also fairly uniquely American. There’s some other countries that celebrate Thanksgiving, but it’s usually on different days. And in America, it is, I

Kevin A McGrail 7:38
believe, the third Thursday in November when it’s celebrated. Now, what’s unusual about that is it’s just a normal business day, most of the places around the world. And at that time, in 1997, we had been getting lots of spam, all kinds of stuff, Chinese, Brazilian, French, whatever, the American as well, but you know, just all kinds of spam. But on Thanksgiving Day in 1997, I got zero spams, and I checked our server, we got very, very little spam, just single digit percentage what we normally got on an average Thursday. And that started me on my journey to fight spammers. I very shortly after that started helping with a project that became Apache SpamAssassin, they became their first DNS servers, and from there joined the Apache Software Foundation. And the rest is history, you know, very proud of our work Apache SpamAssassin, the concepts that we invented there, Justin really had a lot to do with that, obviously don’t want to take away his credit. But the concepts of thresholds, the concepts of using multiple rules, has made SpamAssassin 20 plus years later, quite future proof because you can add new rules, and it’s just a framework for scoring. So today, if you invent a rule that is perfect for identifying phishing, or spam or even good email, you can add it to Spam Assassin and know you’re quite future proofed and using it. But I don’t want to talk too much about Spam Assassin, I will have a workshop after this keynote directly. And I’ll be talking about how I do spam analysis a little bit about how I generate the KAM rules. Maybe you can learn some from it via short workshop. But if anybody out there has samples, bring them we’ll take a look at them. And we’ll analyze them in real time. And kind of tell you about how I do it a little bit of the art and science behind the curtain there. But I thought today for the keynote again, for community what I wanted to do is build some q&a. So I thought I would talk about the two worst mistakes that I ever had in email at least that I think you want to hear about. And I want to hear yours. So put them in the chat. I’ll be here after the keynote. I look forward to hearing your mistakes as well. But the first one really started with a customer called us they were having disk based problems that couldn’t send email etc. So we went on site we got on the machine started working on the issue to clear the recycle bin clear the temp files cleared the trash folder. Everything was great. We left the customer had plenty of disk space. A couple hours later we got a rant where we deleted his important emails in his trash folder. Now, for those of you who work in, you know, day to day customer support, you probably know some of the silly stories like this. But, you know, I guess we couldn’t do anything, you know, not only was trash not backed up by the the backup system, it was specifically exempted from backups. On top of that we never in a million years expected somebody would store real email and trash, we lost that customer. And apparently, we learned nothing from it. Because a few years later, we actually had a very similar problem where a customer called they were having similar problems, all their outbound mail wasn’t going out. We removed it into their machine, we checked their outbound settings, everything looked good. We went into their sent items, or excuse me, their outbox, tons of unsent items, and we couldn’t figure out what was going on. Finally, we realized that a bunch of them were on hold, we fixed it, everything went out. And about an hour later, maybe not even an hour, probably a few minutes later, we got an angry rant from the customer about how we had sent out all the unsent messages. Now, if you were paying attention at the beginning of the story, you recognize that we were cold because unsent messages weren’t going out. So we didn’t understand what the problem was, until the customer explained that in his outbox in his unsent messages, he had about 1200 emails that he had marked on hold not to go out, because they were therapeutic rants, he wrote to people and then never intended to send. So we had just sent out 1200 therapeutic rants that this person had authored over years and years and years to people. Suffice it to say we did lose that customer as well. But game two very interesting stories, at least for how we dealt with email, how the trials and tribulations of managing inboxes for people. So

Kevin A McGrail 11:52
look forward to hearing yours. And you know, my ask my personal ask is that I think we need a new holiday, my journey with anti spam started on Thanksgiving in 1997. It’d be nice if maybe next Thanksgiving, we could get inbox Amnesty Day. And on this day, I think what we would do is we basically just say, on this day, you’re allowed to just delete your inbox. And then if anybody just says, Hey, did you get the email? I said, Oh, wait, no, it was email, and Amnesty Day, I’ll send it to you again. And that way, everybody can win at least one day a year at inbox zero, the video game that I love or zero inbox, whatever you want to call it. However, to finalize out my keynote today, which I hope you’ve enjoyed some of the stories I look forward to reading some of yours is really just the fact that community is key. At the Apache Software Foundation, we have a thing called the Apache way. And it just, it guides how we do what we do. And one of the guiding principles is something called community over code. What it’s based on is the fact that if tomorrow, our data center died, and we lost all our code, that would not be the end of the foundation, because we would still have the community and the community could get together and rewrite the code, and probably even write it better. But if we lost our community, we’d be nowhere. And so we have a statement that’s just community over code, perhaps for this conference, it’s better to say community over code, product, etc. But this community is extremely important because it’s our job to band together, it’s we have to work together because everything that we do keeping email flowing, you know, to quote spice, you know, the inbox must flow, you know, we have to stop bad email, we have to allow good email, we have to shut down the fissures, we have to stop down the bastard scammers and spammers that are out there. And it’s our job together as a community to work together and do that together. Because all that mitigation that we do is critical. Additionally, I love the fact that over the last few years, privacy has gotten to be much more focused on wonderful laws in Europe like GDPR, as well as CCPA. And in California, similar laws and other states in the United States have started bring a focus that inboxes and email is very, very critical to businesses and what people do, and it needs to be kept private. So I like to see that keep going. I’d like to see the community embrace that do that even more, and really just see more people get involved. You know, running a mailbox is possible. It’s fun. It’s a lot of hard work, but it’s very rewarding. And, you know, you don’t have to just go to Google, you don’t have to just use a service provider out there. You can do it yourself. And there’s people like me reach out to me on LinkedIn, I’ll happily talk to you about it. Give you guides out there that as well. And I’m very thankful to all the projects I’ve used over the years from SpamAssassin to mine defang, to Q mail to postfix to send mail etc. So many I’m sure I’m forgetting some clam AV that I use, but I will end by simply saying enjoy the Expo has been an honor for me to give the introduction for this workshop, or for this, excuse me for this conference. Right after this keynote. I will be doing that workshop on spam analysis but enjoy your day. And greetings from the United States in Valencia Andrew back to you.