Authorsteve

SORBS – back soon

If you’ve tried to get an address delisted from SORBS this week you’ll have found that their site is degraded, and there’s no way to request delisting. They’ve been dealing with some very nasty database / hardware problems and while they’re fixing those the externally visible SORBS services are running in a read-only mode (where the list is published, but IP...

On Discovery and Email

If you’re involved in any sort of civil legal action in the US Courts – whether that be claims of patent violation, defamation, sexual harassment or anything else – there’s a point in the pre-trial process where the opposing lawyers can request information from you, and also from any third-parties they believe may have useful information. This phase is called Discovery. US...

Ad-hoc analysis

I often pull emails into a database to analyze them, but sometimes I want something simpler. Emails are typically stored in one of two ways: mbox format, where an entire mailbox is stored in a single file, and maildir format, where a mailbox is a directory with one file in it for each email. My desktop mail application is Mail.app on OS X, and it stores messages in a maildir-ish format, so...

New top level domains

ICANN have signed agreements for four new top level domains, all internationalized domains from the 2o12 applications for new TLDs. They are شبكة (“network” or maybe “web” in arabic), 游戏 (“game” in chinese), онлайн and сайт (“online” and “website” in russian). It’ll take a while for the registries to ramp up their infrastructure...

Know what you're promising, and keep your promises

Although we can’t always provide a personal response to your complaint, we do investigate all reports. Please don’t interpret a lack of response as a lack of action taken. If we find that a customer is violating our policies, we will take make sure they stop the violating activity. That’s the response I had when I reported a particularly annoying spammer to a major ISP this...

What is a dot-zero listing?

Some email blacklists focus solely on allowing their users to block mail from problematic sources. Others aim to reduce the amount of bad mail sent and prefer senders clean up their practices, rather than just blocking them wholesale. The Spamhaus SBL is one of the second type, using listings both to block mail permanently from irredeemable spammers and as short term encouragement for a sender to...

DKIM and DomainKeys, Spam and Ham

I’ve been preaching “DKIM is great! DomainKeys is obsolete, get rid of it!” for several years now. I thought I’d take a look at my mailbox and see who was using authentication. I’ve divided this into “Ham” and “Spam”. Spam is, well, all the spam I’ve received over the past couple of years. Ham is the non-spam mail in my inbox, whether...

DNS, SERVFAIL, firewalls and Microsoft

When you look up a host name, a mailserver or anything else there are three types of reply you can get. The way they’re described varies from tool to tool, but they’re most commonly referred to using the messages dig returns – NXDOMAIN, NOERROR and SERVFAIL. NXDOMAIN is the simplest – it means that there’s no DNS record that matches your query (or any other query for...

CBL website and email back on line

The CBL website is back on line. It’s possible that your local DNS resolver has old values for it cached. If so, and if you can’t flush your local DNS cache, and you really can’t wait until DNS has been updated then you may be able to put a temporary entry in your hosts file to point to cbl.abuseat.org. You can get the IP address you need to add by querying the nameserver at ns...

Mail that looks good on desktop and mobile

Over the weekend I noticed a new CSS framework aimed at email rather than web development, “Antwort“. This isn’t the first or only framework for email content, but this one looks simple and robust, and it allows for content that doesn’t just adapt for different sized displays but looks good on all of them. The idea behind it is to divide your content into columns, magazine...

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