Here’s my problem; people often ask me “So, what do you do for a living?” I find that I don’t have a good, quick answer. Certainly, I know what I do for a living—but there are just not the right terminologies in place for me to talk to the non-IT community (If you’re reading this blog, I bet you’re often in the same spot. Maybe we can help each other—I’m ready to take a try.)
Here is an example:
I’m a consultant to Sendmail’s customers—helping them to design new email systems. Highly secure, scalable, disaster-tolerant systems to keep out the bad stuff, lock in stuff that should be secret, and delivery everything else. But when I talk about “email systems”, most people think about this from their experience using Outlook, Thunderbird, and other email clients. And although the end-user piece is important – it’s really only a tiny piece.
Right now I can imagine hard working Exchange or Domino admins thinking “What?! How can he say that? I work hard to keep my end users happy.” True enough! But here’s the statistics piece of this – as of 2010, over 95% of all mail being sent is removed from the email stream before it hits a person’s in-box. It’s a classic case of the iceberg; the biggest and most threatening part is all below the surface.
The Exchange admin has to plan for the number of messages and number of users on their systems, scale for that load. But people like me (and you, perhaps) have to worry about handling and routing the rest of that email, too.
Actually, it’s the 95% of unwanted mail that is causing many people to move to cloud computing. The thought goes like this—if we move to cloud computing, that unwanted inbound email goes away and our regular staff and servers won’t have to deal with it. This has got to save us money! (In some cases, this turns out to be true – and in other cases not. But that’s another blog.)
Here it is – what I do for a living.
I design and support Messaging Infrastructures.
There it is. If you’re a hard working sys admin who deals with routing and filtering of email, I bet the phrase “Messaging Infrastructure” makes sense without much explanation.
But for anyone else reading this, let me explain what’s involved in the messaging infrastructure. It’s everything that happens automatically and that is invisible to the end user.
On inbound mail, that includes DNS lookups, spam and virus filtering, blocking of unwanted attachments, directory lookups to validate recipient email addresses, complex policy enforcement, archiving, encryption/decryption, whatever other policies are necessary. And finally, delivery of the 5% of good messages into Exchange, Domino, hosted mailboxes, or whatever your company uses.
Outbound and internal email has similar needs. Spam isn’t an issue, but tracking or stopping messages with certain content takes its place as the biggest high priority item.
Anti-spam appliances and other point solutions are part of the infrastructure, but for the system to work smoothly everything needs to work together—DNS servers, Firewalls, Directory servers, network, server hardware, capacity and sizing of all the above, configuration, monitoring, reporting, and of course support. As a whole, it’s like the nervous system and all five senses working together.
In one form or another, every company has a messaging infrastructure and it is VITAL to the business. Without it, email stops flowing and the execs start calling. This oft-overlooked, unsung piece of the IT puzzle deserves an ode:
Silent, Efficient,
Messaging Infrastructure
Gets you your email
OK, not the best Haiku I’ve written. If you can do better, post it! I’ll offer a piece of Sendmail swag to anyone who can do better. 
Michael Donnelly, Messaging Infrastructure Architect—and proud of it.