Whether you’re working on a website for your local corner store, or writing software on the next super-jumbo jet’s critical systems, distractions can contribute to a pretty unhappy working life as a developer or technical writer. Our very trade requires making calculations, creating complex logical paths and holding large amounts of information in your mind all at the same time. Please give us some peace and quiet while we do this… Please!

So you’ve started sending email from your site/application, your application is doing well and you are now sending more e-mail daily. With this comes the fun of finding out that most of the email you now send ends up stuck in your customers spam filters – how did this happen? You aren’t a Nigerian scammer, and people opted-in to hear from you! At this point signing your mail may be the next step.

Nearly all websites these days send email and because of this the majority of developers assume that they “know how to send email from a website”. They continue under this assumption until they have a site or server of their get black listed by a Spam blacklist. Then they are forced to scratch their heads to try and figure out why this happened. Before you hit send on that email requesting to be removed from that Spam blacklist, let’s recap what you should be doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

One of the most common configurations people use when setting up ELMAH is email exception logging so that you get notified whenever “shit’s goin’ down” on your site. This leads to a follow on issue that stems from this in that you end up receiving 100’s of emails a couple of times a week as your website gets scanned by evil doers looking for vulnerabilities – but there is a simple and elegant solution.

Adding Accessibility to a website for access by sight or hearing impaired users is a thought that many developers have post build. Along with this, when you’re tasked with the job of building an accessible website, Visual Studio probably wouldn’t initially be a tool that comes to mind, but Visual Studio has everyone fooled on this topic as it has this functionality covered, you just need to look a little below the surface.