• monstroindustries (unregistered)

    "Unique emails are such a powerful tool for personalization! They help create a more tailored experience for the recipient, which can lead to better engagement and stronger connections. Thanks for sharing these insights!"

  • Jaloopa (unregistered)

    Rigidly enforcing practices to be agile is a dead giveaway that somebody misunderstood or misinterpreted agile as a concept

  • TheCPUWizard (unregistered)

    "Scrum practices to be "agile".

    1. Scrum has no "practices" : It has Roles, Events, Artifacts and Values...
    2. Scrum may or may not align with the Agile Manifesto
    3. A Scrum Print will either accomplish the Sprint GOAL or be canceled. The items that involve achieving that goal may be refined and updated at all points during the goal.
    4. While the PO has control over the items on the Backlog and their Order, the TEAM has full control over "accepting work into the sprint" (i.e. it is not assigned into the sprint).

    Now, Scrum, may or may not be what works for a given organization/team - that is immaterial. But at least please be correct.

    If it follows this document: https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html then the Scrum FRAMEWORK is in use. If it leaves out ANY element, it is NOT Scrum, If it adds any element which is not complementary (ie contradicts the Guide) it is NOT Scrum...

  • Bleep the Sheep (unregistered)

    It's also predicated on a quirk of gmail, that punctuation is ignored and that anything after the + is also ignored in forming the gmail account for delivery.

    Thus the code doesn't create a unique email inbox for every message. But change gmail to something else, and messages will get rejected as "no such user".

  • George (unregistered) in reply to Bleep the Sheep

    This is not a "quirk of gmail" it is a feature in the email RFC that Gmail implemented correctly. It's called "plus addressing" meaning that anything to the right of the + sign is a label and it's delivered to the same "root" email address.

    So these two addresses: [email protected] and [email protected] will be delivered to [email protected] regardless of email providers. This is not a Gmail-only feature.

  • Hanzito (unregistered)

    If you can't change direction, you're not agile.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Jaloopa

    One of the most common things in business. "Let's go agile, it means we have daily meetings and release code every two weeks!" while ignoring everything else that agile says/does.

  • (nodebb) in reply to DocMonster

    One of the most common things in business. "Let's go agile, it means we have daily meetings and release code every two weeks!" while ignoring everything else that agile says/does.

    Quoted for truth. Often people will put together a roadmap: in Sprint 1 we'll do this, in Sprint 2 we'll do that, and by the end of Sprint 6 the product will be complete. Missing the point completely.

  • Jaloopa (unregistered) in reply to DocMonster

    I've talked about it in job interviews as small a agile (giving teams the tools to solve problems the best way for their situation, basically the agile manifesto) vs big A Agile (management forces something on the team top down that kind of looks like some of the more popular agile practices in the industry).

    It's disheartening to see how many companies view standups as an extra way for management to micromanage. At one job I had stand ups that regularly went on for 45 minutes, and we were standing up for them. Everything else was pretty much waterfall. There was someone whos job was mainly to keep the project plan updated, changing the expected dates of the current projects and the following ones as delays happened

  • (nodebb)

    You are not agile if you Scrumble and fall.

    Also, projects like this are best rejected completely after two teams fail to deliver anything. Trying to fix a project with no functional code is a waste of time. Start over (see Royce, 1970).

  • (nodebb) in reply to George

    Which email RFC is that? Most RFCs are protocols that define interoperability between systems, not internal behavior of systems.

    Gmail didn't invent this feature, though, I remember it on mail systems in the 80's or 90's. There are some "best common practice" RFCs, there might be one that recommends this for consistent user experience.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Jaloopa

    It's disheartening to see how many companies view standups as an extra way for management to micromanage.

    Management makes the rules, so the natural tendency is for all meeting to serve the needs of management. All meetings eventually turn into status meetings unless this tendency is recognized and avoided. That's why the Scrum guide referenced above specifically says that the daily scrum is to be attended by developers and the scrum master and product owner are only invited if they are contributors for this sprint. And, even then, they participate as developers, not as leaders.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Barry Margolin

    Which email RFC is that?

    5233 - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5233

  • (nodebb) in reply to George

    Plus addressing, as well as mostly ignoring dots and case insensitivity, are not standardized. The validity of the "localpart" of an email address always permitted them, but did not assign semantics to plus or dot or case, leaving that entirely to the local implementation. It just happens that many major mail providers have chosen to implement a similar plus-addressing extension.

    I wrote the same thing in 1990 while I was contracting at Intel, but created it as "dot addressing" so that [email protected] would be delivered to merlyn. It got accepted (via Joe Pruett) to be a common optional feature in the sendmail configuration. And of course, I've used that on stonehenge's delivery for decades as well.

  • (nodebb) in reply to RandalSchwartz

    Where does email addressed to "[email protected]" get delivered?

    The idea of "plus addressing" was implemented as a way to filter messages using email clients (almost all CLI through 1980s) and today is commonly used by those who know about it to track how an email address is shared. (I frequently will use a plus address on a site and I am amazed to learn that "we won't sell your email address" is a lie told by seemingly reputable companies.)

    On a tangent but related, there have been many sites I've visited where the plus address is not allowed. It is my personal opinion that this practice is adopted to prevent a user from knowing who is selling their email address; if Site 1, Site 2, and Site 3 prevent the plus, and then Site 3 sells your email address to 100 other sites, you won't know it was them. Bummer...

  • JJ (unregistered) in reply to Bananafish

    Always wonder how this 'I know where spam came from' is working, surely spam developers have a found way to filter out the +anything part by now.

  • (nodebb)

    Apparently, in this organization, "Agile" means "Plan the sprint then do whatever hits your fancy" or did I miss how clumsy "unique" email-handling affects the overflow of text boxes?

    I mean, yes, put it on the backlog/to-do-list, but fixing 40–50 modules, isn't that going to take time, require testing and possibly introduce new bugs?

    Maybe I'm too old... Maybe I've seen too many systems where that incorrect data makes vital things happen elsewhere in the system, making 100% "unrelated" function X do Y instead of Z because A instead of B was stored in C... :D

  • Officer Johnny Holzkopf (unregistered) in reply to Bananafish

    If plus-addressing is not possible ("The + character is not allowed. Trust us! Enter your personal address, we won't share it!"), a less convenient, but still working approach is to use aliases. You usually need to create those before using them (which makes them somehow inconvenient), but they fulfill the same purpose: Let's say you are [email protected], but you're refusing to register with that address at the services of Initech, Initrode and BrainDmgr, so you create [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected] - if you happen to own example.com, that is. (You could also use something less... intimidatingly obvious... like numbers or character garbage.) Also use neither + or . for "splitting", to keep your real prefix "bob" and still combine it with the services's name, just in case a "smart AI customer experience blockchain" is employed by the mentioned services just cut at + or . and get [email protected]. Of course do not, never, under no circumstances give the address [email protected] to anyone, only the alias addresses. ANd by the time you receive spam arriving at [email protected], you know who's guilty at lying... "We take your privacy. Seriously!" This technique of using aliases is considered "old people's stuff", but I thought it would be worth mentioning it again, because it's so obvious people tend to forget about it. (And: Yes, it assumes you're in control of your own domain and mailboxes and aliases, which is totally "uncool" today because there are free services for that which love to drown you in ad spam.) Now get off my lawn.

  • Darren (unregistered)

    Microsoft Exchange doesn't support plus addressing. I've just tried it and it throws back a snotty message that the format of the email address isn't correct.

    As for companies who say they don't sell your email address - that may well be true. They're not 'selling' it as such, they just are trading it with other companies for their email addresses. They're playing with semantics to hide their true intentions.

  • Hasseman (unregistered) in reply to TheCPUWizard

    From my experience I tend to call it SCRotUM

  • kolik (unregistered) in reply to Officer Johnny Holzkopf

    I run my own mail server with aliases and a little frontend to configure mail accounts and aliases, just for this purpose. Unfortunately I am also hesitant to type credentials of any sort into signup pages, so I rarely need my aliases - but when I do, they're very handy. They also have the nice bonus that when something you signed up for starts sending spam, you can just delete the alias and never see the spam again. You don't have to muck about with an unsubscribe link that may or may not work. And it's nice to know that I'm in control of my emails.

  • Bleep the Sheep (unregistered) in reply to George

    The feature that gmail offered was codified in the standard.

    RFC5233 is dated January 2008 gmail is generally credited with starting on April 1, 2004

  • (nodebb) in reply to JJ

    That would require spammers to be a lot smarter than they really are.

  • (nodebb) in reply to dkf

    Spammers get smart when their usual practice starts failing too much. Plus-addressing is way too niche to force them to think.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Medinoc

    I think there's also a cost-benefit analysis going on. People who are canny enough to use plus-addressing are less likely to be a source of income for the scammers, so it doesn't make economic sense to spend coding resources on them.

    I've seen this also as a reason that scam emails so often contain spelling errors. Anyone who would notice isn't in the target market anyway, so let them weed themselves out.

  • (nodebb) in reply to jkshapiro

    I agree.

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