Mike Hillyer's Personal Webspace » Message Systems

The Joy of Being the Leader

Mike Hillyer — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 15:33:02 +0000

Just need to put this here to make it easier to find in the future.

Still Hiring

Mike Hillyer — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 03:48:30 +0000

At Message Systems we're always growing, here's the latest positions:

Marketing Writer
Graphic Designer
Web UI Developer
Software Engineer - Mobility
Sales Manager (North East)
Client Integration Specialist
Support Engineer
Software Engineer

See them all at: http://www.messagesystems.com/company/careers/

If you're interested, contact me using mike @ this domain.

We’re Hiring

Mike Hillyer — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:21:26 +0000

One unfortunate side effect of the Oracle acquisition of Sun and therefore MySQL is that apparently a number of good people will no longer be part of that team. If any are reading and need a lead, we have a number of positions open at http://www.messagesystems.com/company/careers/:

Web Site Developer

Project Manager

Pre-Sales Engineer (UK)

Director of Sales (UK)

Sales Manager (North East)

Director of Quality Assurance

Director, Professional Services

Client Integration Specialist

Support Engineer

Software Engineer

If interested contact me (myfirstname @ this domain) and I'll gladly get your resume to the right people. Of course, if you're not former MySQL and interested you can also feel free to contact me.

Mailchimp Makes Project Omnivore Public

Mike Hillyer — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:12:59 +0000

Pretty impressive blog post at MailChimp today, in which they make public the details of their Project Omnivore: http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/project-omnivore-declassified.

In short:

Omnivore is a program that runs in the background and analyzes email campaign and user account data. Non-stop.

When it finds anything suspicious about a MailChimp user or his campaigns, it’ll do one of two things:

Send the user a warning for something that looks problematic.

Suspend a user’s account for something bad, send them a warning, and alert our abuse team to investigate the account.

The long version is at the link and the impressive part is how much data and prediction they are incorporating into the tool to help them avoid sending campaigns that will damage their sending reputation in the long run. It's not just about filtering the mail stream to make sure it's not going to trip filters, but watching the list management practices of their customers.

This is the kind of thing that all ESPs are going to have to start doing moving toward, using internal systems to ensure that the right message is being sent to the right people, then combined with tools like Adaptive Delivery and real-time bounce and feedback loop processing to make sure that the messages are being sent in the right way.

Some days I'd just like to see what a company like MailChimp would do with our toolset, give them a messaging server with internal scripting that can hook into their datasources and I'd wager some very cool things would come out.