Techie :: Techno ::: February 2005 Archives

I killed MySQL this morning when I was doing an upgrade Note to self: Remember to restart the damned thing after running apt-get upgrade

I am getting really tired of other people's anti-spam measures. I got the following from a mail server this morning (sanitised to protect the innocent): The address to which the message has not yet been delivered is: xx@xxxx.com Delay reason: SMTP error from remote mailer after RCPT TO:: host mail.xxxxx.com xx.xxx.xxx.xxx]: 451-Thank you for emailing xxx, due to our Anti-Spam policy , and since this 451-is the first e-mail to the company since 16th of February , your email has 451-been rejected. Please resend this e-mail after one hour and you will be 451-added to our safe senders list and you will no longer encounter this 451-message. We apologise for any inconveniene this may have casued. 451-xx.xxx.xxx.xxis not ye The mail in question contained important information for the client. How are we meant to do business with people who are implementing this kind of craziness on their SMTP servers? If you don't want spam I can respect that and I can advise you on how to avoid it, but this kind of carry on is detrimental to business communication.

How on earth can a registrar lose a domain? I got this from a well-known ICANN registrar today: The domain is in our system as a 'lost name'. Please let me know which account you would like the domain pushed to and the registrant information that you would like on the domain. So it was like Little Bo Peep losing her sheep?? How on earth can you "lose" a domain?

A few weeks ago I started doing some work on geo specific filtering, where email is treated very differently depending on the sending IP. Since implementing this we have been very happy with the results. I also run a UML for my personal usage and for a couple of my pet projects. It's a nice place to try things out. Needless to say the domains hosted on it do get sent a lot of spam, however the main filters usually block most of it. Unfortunately spammers really do not care about respecting DNS "rules" and instead of mail being sent to the domains' MX an increasing amount of junk is hitting the A records.

I've been using the excellent Sugar CRM for the last couple of months. The last couple of releases have included an optional (paid) plugin for Outlook. It interfaces with Sugar via soap and allows you to export contact details from emails and archive entire emails. Very very handy! The only gripe I have with it is that the GUI lacks a "close" button, but has a "cancel" one, which suggests that the action is going to be cancelled.

I'm not much of an Excel user, so anything that makes my life easier is always welcome :mrgreen: Someone posted a link to a very handy (and free) utility on a bulletin board Looks kind of handy!