Like everybody else, I get a ton of email. And it’s not surprising.

Gmail’s spam filters are good, but it’s a game of cat and mouse with email “marketers”.
Email address lists get shared.
People get stealthfully opt-ed into newsletters.
Companies will do almost anything to compete for your attention.

Types of email

Broadly, my email will almost always fit into one of three categories:

1. Email I never want to see.
2. Email that I should see. Maybe I need to reply. But it should never leave my inbox unless I manually archive or delete it.
3. Email that only has value if I see it when it first comes in. These are things that either require immediate attention, or they rapidly become completely valueless.

There’s been some great work done for emails that I never want to see. A few basic filters with wildcards do wonders. And the folks behind unfuck.email have a few pre-built filters that turbocharge this filtering.

There are a few different types of connectivity. Internet exchanges, or IXs, are a common way for networks to reach a large number of other networks, all via a single router interface. Today I want to discuss the economics of IX connectivity, and how many IXs haven’t kept up with the commercial terms offered in the broader connectivity market.

I’m going to avoid the topic of per-unit costs. This is something that would usually need to be negotiated between the parties involved, and much like transit, there are always a number of unique factors that must be considered. If you’re interested in this topic, Dave Temkin gave a presentation on transit vs IX pricing trends at NANOG 67, and while the numbers have changed, the theme remains the same. (Here are links to Dave’s slides and presentation.)

Multi-factor authentication, or MFA, was introduced sometime in the mid-late 1980s, and was initially aimed at the defense industry. It was originally referred to as 2FA, or two factor authentication.

Over the past 20 years, we’ve seen adoption pick up, and many popular applications and web-based services now support, or even mandate, use of a second factor when logging in, or accessing sensitive data. Also over the past many years, we’ve seen methods for authentication evolve.