Greylisting to fight spam

Awhile ago, someone mentioned the concept of greylisting to fight spam. The concept is that the first time an email server connects to my mail server, my server would reject that connection for a delay message saying that the server should try again later, typically 4 hours later. The premise is that most spam servers or trojan horses try to send spam once and then don't try again. Great in concept, but it would delay my email the first time someone sent me email. I didn't implement it because I didn't want the delay.

Recently, the IT guy for one of my clients started implementing this on their server, so I took another look. He pointed me to milter-greylist and it looked interesting; it was interesting as I could determine which addresses would use greylisting. So, I implemented it and set it up so that some of my secondary addresses would get greylisting support. I saw about a 20% drop in number of messages that were hitting dspam. This is excellent as it reduced server load.

I still wish more ISP would do more to prevent random users from sending mail via SMTP from home machines and more companies would implement SPF. Speaking of SPF, I ordered some stuff from BabyCenter.com and was surprised when I didn't get my order email. I tracked down the problem; they published an SPF record:

babycenter.com. 3600 IN TXT "v=spf1 a:mailers.babycenter.com -all"

This means that all email comes form mailers.babycenter.com. That's a problem as their online store is run off another server, so email from it doesn't come from mailers.babycenter.com. Since my server uses SPF, it rejected the email. Nice try, babycenter.com, but please get a clue before implementing an anti spam technique.

Is someone trying to tell me something?

I received email from the alumni office of my alma mater (Harvey Mudd College). The message starts out: "I received your name from the Office of Alumni Relations as someone who might be able to attend our Social Business Luncheon..." and then goes on to say "The purpose of the evening of course is to learn the art of dining, etiquette...".

Are they trying to tell me something? Are my dining habits all that ape like? Maybe my son is rubbing off on me as he gets his food all over his face (he just started eating solid foods).

Mailing list for the paranoid (or parents)

My wife and I signed up for the Consumer Product Safety Commission's recall newsletter. I thought this was a good idea to see which of our son's toys we need to inspect. Little did I know that we'd get email just about everyday with a few more recalls. These recalls don't make headlines, but they make you go "hmmmm" when there are so many. Today's email had 4 products in it, all made in China, 3 for violation of Lead Paint Standard. China needs to get on the ball or our government could ban imports of certain products.

Sad day for NotifyMail

Monday marked a sad day for NotifyMail. After 13.5 years of using the product that I wrote (it helped launch my career), I have finally stopped using it. Do I still want to be notified instantly of new mail? Absolutely. Do I still believe in the product? Well, sort of. Several months back, I wrote about my switch to IMAP. While I was having an email exchange with a friend, I couldn't understand how he responded so quickly. He said his mail client just kept putting new messages in his mailbox and I soon learned about IMAP IDLE. I found a plugin for Mail.app and sources tell me that this is a standard part of Leopard's Mail.app client. IMAP IDLE basically keeps a connection open to the server and just gets pinged when there is new mail or a new transaction. This is much better than NotifyMail because there is no server configuration required and no separate desktop app to run. It does keep a connection open, but sends/receives very little traffic.

Please, a moment of silence for NotifyMail.