If there’s one thing that’s visible every day, it’s that users (& some administrators/developers) are easily confused. Take for instance the “Find My Friends” misfea...
Well you are of course. Then there are spammers, whom we try to control with SPF records in the DNS to limit where your email can come from to the servers you use. Then there are misguided websites w...
Nice unit spoiled by small things at the edges
So when someone phones you up, saying they are a Microsoft Technician, or someone employed by Microsoft you can be sure it is a fraud attempt. I suggest you say “Hold on a moment, be right back” and ...
Sometimes I don’t think English is adequate. “Here it is, I’ve configured it for you, you just have to plug the bits in.” I said. Unfortunately I made the mistake of leaving ...
Hotmail, and possibly other broken software, ignores the MX record if there is an A record, even when it does not point to a mail service.
I’ve just experienced the perils of being left behind by Moore’s law, and lack of commercial incentive. I’ve been on holiday in the Scottish Highlands. Let’s say upfront that...
holiday cover
Sometimes one can’t go out because something is due to be delivered. With International shipments one does not get the luxury of the 1 hour timeslots offered by the responsible on-line grocers,...
Does anyone understand the mess of side effects called Joomla enough to write code? I need to quickly replicate some functionality from a hacked Mambo system into Joomla. Mambo code exists and is ava...
When google blocks access to content.
The ceremonial handover of the last block of addresses available in the Second Internet Addressing Scheme (IP4) at the London Transport Museum, Covent Garden on Tuesday 22 March 2011. This marks the ...
I’ve just had an e-mail arrive in my SPAM folder that looks extremely dangerous. It purports to be from the British Red Cross appealing for Japan, but The Red Cross were on the radio yesterday ...
As one might imagine, we are long-term exponents of open-source. We don’t use Microsoft product, so it’s quite amusing to be Phoned up out of the blue to be told we have a windows virus....
The base standard for email RFC822 is close to 30 years old. You’ld think by now that people would be capable of adhering to it, and that deviations would be jumped on by every anti-spam tool ...
Dear Blackberry, I am not prepared to pay you to tell you your systems are misconfigured. When I send you a note to let you know that you are generating message-ids that are not standards compliant ...
Since forever the conventional way of dealing with ever growing log files has been to move the old file aside into an ‘n’ deep push-down stack, so that for logfile ‘log’ the m...
Being on the internet is risky. It used to be that a new PC connected to the net would be taken over in under 20 minutes unless protective measures were taken. Fortunately this is no longer the cas...
I’ld like to send some feedback to Daniel Olfelt author of the ics calendar plugin for WordPress. Kudos to him! Trouble is his website contact form has a captcha plug in which is not generati...
It’s a very sad milestone. As of this week we mark over 98% of the messages we are offered as SPAM. The press has some catching up to do — they report 92% — a figure we were at ba...
Sometimes you have to give up, and take the hit of extra SPAM. For me personally, one of the more valuable features of ASSP’s SPF checks was to apply the check to incoming addresses that are o...
Things have changed a lot in the 30 years I’ve been doing e-mail systems. In those first heady days, establishing a transport fabric was hard work, and getting a message through over a mixture...
Sometimes I wonder when I get requests like this, especially from customers on a very basic hosting package. Initially it might seem a perfectly reasonable request, but it does not work for multiple...
“Ok so how do I make a big SPF record? I’ve run over the size of a DNS TXT record.” Well as I commented elsewhere you can’t simply have a bunch of records as only the first on...
I’ve been rehearsing that comment for a while, as people tell me they can’t send mail to my customers, and what am I going to do about it? SPF is the Sender Policy Framework. If a mail f...
It’s amazing how easy it is to get something wrong when configuring complex systems. When it comes to networking the first thing that people notice is when their e-mail goes wrong, because e-ma...
Some companies live on top of their hardware. When there is a failure it;s just a walk down the corridor. For OA5 it takes a bit longer, which is why we rent space from a hosting centre which does ha...
There are 2 really lovely pieces of contributer-supported software out there from an IPPs perspective. Both have a really lovely property — they can be installed as ‘multisite’ con...
Shortcuts make life easier for us. For administrators configuring DNS there is a great shortcut which tells the program reading the zone where it is. This lets the administrator leave off the domai...
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