Who am I kidding... yes there's definitely some things that go out the door that probably should have more testing before doing so. The nice thing about how things are set up, it's very easy to revert deployments to the previous version or quickly deploy an updated patched version. That said, with the main site, I usually stick strictly to versioned Milestones and only deploy once that milestone is completed and refrain from mid-release deployments or random 'one offs' if possible.
Didn't work out so great. I added a feature that on certain email bounce error codes, it will auto unsubscribe that email address to avoid future sending. Well, I goofed setting some email headers and caused a bounce to my own address which auto unsubscribed me from everything. Looks like I missed... more
Some receiving mail servers report to the sending server that a message was marked as spam. Groups.io receives these messages and unsubscribes your e-mail address. It gets to be annoying when it's done incorrectly. (I've had to fish a few groups.io digests out of the spam bucket.) Is that basically... more
I'll probably try turning it back on in a few days. I wanted to make sure that the email headers fix I put in was working 100% before I turned back on the auto-unsubscribing. (So far, no issues) Below are the rough steps that trigger an auto-unsubscribe. If any step fails, no action is taken, just the... more
I remember hearing about domain keys when it first came out. Guess that's why my e-mail doesn't see as much spam as it used to, even though my address is posted publicly on Usenet. (Or is it just Usenet's dying out? Sad to see it go.)
It makes it sort of a pain as the person sending the emails but makes the quality of life of the recipients so much better than it was back in the day. I wonder how many more layers they can plop on over the coming years or if something will finally replace email. (Thinking probably not... Sort of like... more
The average person doesn't know that, but it's really just a post card. Intended for recipient only, but not private. It makes it very easy to eavesdrop on it. Secure messages are things like Whatsapp. Will IM programs ever replace e-mail? Well, they've made e-mail look a lot like IM programs....... more
But it makes sense. The sending and receiving parties have to read the email in order to process them. You can base64 encode the body but that's trivial to reverse. (IIRC the types of transfer encoding were 7bit, 8bit, base64, printable and binary or something) I guess that's how messages with too much... more
It's just how it's got to work. The body could easily be encrypted, but it needs to be seamless. PGP never really took off, unfortunately. Sometimes I think it's a useful thought exercise to pretend an email costs the same as postage stamp. Do you really need to spend that money to just tick off... more
It's using server resources on every hop it makes to the final mail server. It's probably a fraction of a fraction of a cent from end to end but the sheer amount of unsolicited spam emails that get generated and sent around must cost a somewhat substantial amount of money overall. I had that issue only... more
I'm sure somewhere you can find stats on how much stuff is on the Internet backbones that no one actually wants. Spam, the Nieman-Marcus cookie recipie that's been forwarded 35 times without being cleaned up, etc. It's actually quite a bit. It could be that it's an exchange server... Yahoo! and... more
It's just been so long since I've done IT/SRE work besides just development that I wasn't sure if maybe MIcrosoft had their own spam filter that they do on top of whatever your local Exchange server has set up. I guess thinking about it now, that would probably annoy a bunch of IT workers who are wondering... more
and the receivers waste around $.95/message (like those being stolen from) and the only real solution is filtering (like theft prevention) but that takes resources (like buying locks does) and everyone except the spammers (thieves) would be happier without it. I really didn't expect the analogy to... more