Linklog Current StatusIMAP was a hero to most, but it never meant shit to me. (To paraphrase Public Enemy.) I’ve never been a user of client-end, GUI mail software. My first Internet MUA was PcElm (as distributed by Demon as part of their. KA9Q-based software package). After a brief dalliance with Pine I came back home to Mutt. I have always used terminal based apps to read mail from [...]
There’s a good chance NTK now got nuked by a few SpamAssassin installations this week. NTK usually skirts close to the thresholds many filter systems – its invitation to unsubscribe, WHOLE LINE OF YELLING, the occasional IP addresses in a URL. Every week we get a handful of automatic mails from corporate email systems either accusing it of being [...]
I was a bit sceptical. But since reading the current draft for the proposed Sender Permitted From anti-spoofing (and, by extension, anti-spam) scheme, I’m still a little sceptical, but find myself thinking ”blimey, this one might actually stand a chance”. It’s still early days yet, but it almost feels like ghost of a lost RFC – fragments of an early submission that was somehow [...]
Since it was linked from last week’s NTK people other than Googlebot have read a post I made in May about tightening SMTP standards and I’ve begun to get some feedback. One correspondent questioned the validity of using SMS-spam as some indication that micropayment systems wouldn’t necessarily deter spam. It’s a fair point, I suppose. Message charges are set (and collected) by [...]
When I was at college I briefly used an address of the form lee@cs.mycollege.ac.uk (CS being the subdomain used by the Department of Computer Science). Anyone familiar with the JANET big-endian domain naming convention will have spotted the mistake I made there. And will understand why meddling with top-level DNS can have unexpected effects. Even though our college had changed over to [...]
Salon currently has an article (in its premium section) in which Jakob (I have stopped using e-mail and hired staff to do it for me) Nielson proposes his dump-SMTP solution to spam and viruses: It would really mean to stop accepting e-mail according to all the existing protocols. I think that the only way to do that is [...]
Is the DMA about to start endorsing a DNSDB approach to filtering email? From a recent NMA article: Head of the Direct Marketing Association’s interactive media division, Robert Dirskovski, said its Email Marketing Council had been discussing the possibility of introducing a white list solution. This would list those who are entitled to send email, and would be regulated by ISPs and/or a government agency. [...]
Route View has announced a new DNSDB service to resolve AS and AS path views. So to give an example news.bbc.co.uk: $ dig +short a news.bbc.co.uk. newswww.bbc.net.uk. 212.58.226.30 $ dig +short txt 30.226.58.212.aspath.routeviews.org. “6895 4589 2818 9156″ “212.58.224.0″ “19″ “2905 6453 9156 2818″ “212.58.224.0″ “20″ If you have no idea what any of that means, relax, don’t worry about it. Carry on [...]
The reactions to the DTI’s anti-spam regulations have been somewhat less than positive. For a start, they don’t prohibit mail going to addresses used for business (other than opt-out-per-campaign, which will have little effect). One of the practical objections to this being: how can a spammer differentiate between a business and personal address? You can’t usually tell just by looking at an [...]
Yes, on some fundamental level I believe Verisign’s abuse of wildcard DNS for their Site Finder service is wrong. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all bad. Analysis of the F Root Server has shown a huge number of unnecessary queries. Much of the resolver infrastructure out there is broken, but rather than fixing it we expect the root and gtld servers [...]
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