Tag Archives: mail

Tech Tip: Don’t use qmail as a mail server

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A while ago I added a new anti-spam technique to my mail server setup called “No Listing”.

No listing basically means putting a high priority MX record in the DNS that always rejects mail server connections..

It seems, however, that the qmail mail server can’t cope with that.  It’s not RFC compliant.

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Adding Envelope Sender in sendmail

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Fair warning: This post is pretty darn technical and is of little interest to people who don’t muck around with Linux and/or mail servers.

Recently I had a problem with someone on a midrange.com mailing list where they sent obvious spam.

The problem was, they were a subscriber to the list and had posted before … so the normal counter measures for that didn’t work (the first post for all subscribers are held until approved, to prevent people from subscribing, posting spam, and unsubscribing).

The puzzling thing about this was … the ‘from address’ on the message was not in the subscriber list.

Turns out that Mailman will accept message based on the FROM address of the message or the SENDER address (also known as the envelope-from).  The sender addressed is set by the sending mail server and is not normally in the body of the message.

After a bit of digging around, I figured out a way to add this information to the message headers so I can more easily diagnose the problem in the future.

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Report as SPAM

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It’s nice that many of the major mail providers give you the ability to report a message you’ve received as spam … but some of them make it far TOO easy to report something as spam.

I’ve noticed that many of the big names put the “Report as spam” button way too close to the delete button.

Let’s take a look at some of the providers …

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iPhone

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iPhoneWe bit the bullet … we got iPhones.   Our Verizon cell phone contract has been up for quite a while and they’ve been bugging us to re-up for a new two year contract … but I haven’t been super happy with the service and phones, so we started thinking about what other provider and phone’s would be a suitable substitute.

My co-worker Jerome has the iPhone and is very happy to show it off.   Even on the first release I have to admit, it was pretty cool.   The interface was nice, the features were nice, and the sound quality wasn’t bad at all.

The only things I really didn’t like at the get go was the fact that you were tied to AT&T and the battery wasn’t replaceable.

After mulling our alternatives, we decided to go for it.   Both Ginny and I got the 8gb   model.   We were originally thinking about the 16gb model, but the Apple store didn’t have any in stock and we figured, since we only used a fraction of our 4gb iPods, it wasn’t that big a deal.

A few observations …

  1. It doesn’t like the fact that I use self signed certs on my mail server.   I’ll probably have to bite the bullet and get a proper cert.
  2. I haven’t found any ability to select which folders I show in my IMAP mail account.   Wish I could, as I really only care about a handful on an ongoing basis.
  3. One feature that’s missing, and was almost a deal breaker, was the lack of voice command dialing.   On my old moto phone I could just tell it “Call James Rich Mobile” and it would call James Rich’s cell phone (in my address book).   Nice for talking while driving.
  4. As one would expect from an Apple product, the user interface is slick.   The screen is a bit over sensitive though.   I suspect it’s just something to get used to.
  5. The pseudo GPS functionality is very cool … I really want to figure out how they do it, because it was able to figure out where was I better than my GPS can.
  6. Porting of both the phone numbers on my Verizon account was smooth and fast.   It only took 30 minutes to complete.   I’m going to verify that Verizon cancels my account just in case.

One annoyance, unrelated to the iPhone itself, was the fact that it seems kind of hard to find accessories at stores that don’t actually sell the iPhone.   Woodfield mall, and the Apple store, were both very crowded … and both Ginny and I were in a hurry to escape (yeah, so we could play with the new toys) … so we skipped getting protective skins for the new phones.   We stopped at Best Buy on the way home, but they only had 2 or 3 skins & cases for the iPhone.   I’ll probably stop at Frys on my way home tomorrow to pick something up.

I’m kind of interested to see what the SDK is all about … I’ve got some ideas for apps that could be   fun.