Did I invent it, or did AI?
I love AI – plain and simple.
It is a common practice for me to put ChatGPT into “Conversation” mode on my drives home from work. For those who don’t know, this mode allows you to converse with ChatGPT as you would with anyone else on a phone call. (Read More Here)
I often indulge my meandering mind with questions such as “How did the first Punic wars start?” or “Imagine a super intelligence was in charge of fixing America; what actions might it take?”
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After some back-and-forth with the AI, I had conceptualized an application that would…
In the aftermath of Google’s April enforcement of its new email spam filter rules, I needed to verify the details of my understanding of its impact on Google Workspace emails. I had always worked from the premise that “Gmail Spam Filter affects Google Workspace the same way it affects Gmail, and this creates an unfortunate blind spot for B2B senders, as email addresses using Google Workspace cannot be targeted and suppressed.”
So I looped in my AI friend and asked:
“Does the Google Spam Filter affect Google Workspace mailboxes?”
For those who don’t know, Google Workspace is like Microsoft Office 365, and powers about 50% of all business emails.
The AI cheerfully explained that the Gmail Spam Filter affects Google Workspace precisely like Gmail.
I explained that I needed to suppress Google Workspace email addresses in my sends and asked the AI how it would go about doing that. It told me that because there are no indicators in the configuration of an email address, whether it is Google or Microsoft (or anyone else), you couldn’t suppress B2B emails to Google Spam Filter environments.
Then I asked a new question, one that had never occurred to me before:
“Assume I can parse the domain from the email and look up the domain record. Is there anything I could check indicating if the domain used Google, Microsoft, or another provider?”
AI responded, “If you could parse the domain and have the means to look up DNS records, you could look up the MX record and determine if the mail server was configured to use Google or Outlook.”
After some back-and-forth with the AI, I had conceptualized an application that would be able to take a .csv file of email addresses, parse the domain, use a DNS lookup, and return a new downloadable file with the probable email provider (Google/Outlook, etc.). Last but not least, I said, “Please generate a prototype script for me to use as a proof of concept.”
The prototype didn’t work, nonetheless, the idea was born. Within a few weeks, one client began to move forward with implementing this concept, and my development team started working on a new SAAS product offering this as a service. Now, don’t rush to buy Tactical stock yet; I don’t think this is a company maker – but it prompted the fundamental question:
