For the people who like to find trends and cabals, I’ve seen two new trends lately. The first is Hard Disk dying, the other is people bouncing back to sender the spam.
For the first trend, I joined the cabal myself: Defiant’s disk is dying, and this is bad because I was going to stress it even more with catalyst building today, as Zac fixed the portage bug that prevented me to work on it yesterday (thanks Zac, without you we wouldn’t be able to continue using Portage day by day 🙂 ). Luckily, the box is not my main box nor my server (Farragut and Enterprise run both on Samsung drives, only Defiant ran on Maxtor), and I do have a spare Maxtor 80G to give it. The problem is that I have to reinstall it from scratch, and this is probably not going to happen today because I have a friend of mine coming to my house that I need to help.
Well, this 20G drive I was using is quite old now, I bought it for my first Pentium 133, which means it was either 1998 or 99, so it’s not that unexpected that the disk was going to die sooner or later. It’s just an unfortunate coincidence that it died today. Oh well, I’ve the spare and I will put it on tomorrow most likely, so if all goes well, while I’m at the meeting Tuesday afternoon, Defiant will be simply building everything again (I hope).
Talking about the second trend, I wonder why on the Earth mail admins has to reject mails with high spam score. You know, if the mail is spam, the From address is surely forged, you’re just going to spam someone else. The same happens for viruses. The rare cases where a false positive happens, well, are, in my opinion, not worth the hassle you shove on other people.
The funny thing is that I didn’t start receiving such a mail for a while till two days ago, when postmodern started doing so. Then I’ve seen other four mail servers doing the same, with the most different messages for rejection. Stupid stupid thing!
WRT bouncing spam back to the (likely forged) sender: I’m probably one of those offenders you write about, having installed a challenge-response front end to my mail server a couple of years ago.While TMDA has considerably reduced the amount of spam *I* have to look at, there are uncounted others who have received challenges from my mail server that have no idea what I’m talking about.Challenge-response seemed like a good idea at the time, but the collateral damage is high. Soon as I replace that OBSD mail server with a Gentoo one, I’ll dump TMDA. Promise.
Another problem that I seem to get bit by a lot is a mail server accepting mail from _user@domain_ from _some ip_ and _some ip_ does not correspond to _domain_.Maybe that’s alright in the world of SMTP, I’m not sure, but it’s alwys fradulant in the cases I’ve gotten bounced back.