Transition

[mario]

Still have a lot of emails to respond to, but want to share some thoughts.

I knew it wouldn't be easy, and it indeed wasn't smooth as I hoped. While majority of users who transitioned their accounts had no issue, there was a small percentage of users who had issues. And small percentage of Gixen users is still measured in hundreds.

Lesson #1 is not to count that users will receive activation emails, despite doing everything right on the mailer's side (DNS & reverse DNS, SPF record, clear IP). There was no reason why Gixen emails should be flagged as spam, yet they were by hotmail (partially) and AOL (completely). Microsoft has some "certification" program that would whitelist commercial email, and it costs in thousands. My conclusion is that this was about money, not anti-spam. AOL has some other procedure that I tried in the past, and it led nowhere.

Lesson #2 is to not try to make it too smooth. My intent was to allow simultaneous use of both backends for some time (10 days or so) to make transition easier and give users more time to convert their accounts. This probably made things more complicated.