Technology & MSG

I can’t be the only person who has to cope with these sorts of scenarios, but here’s another one from the cube farm.
When you send me an email, I read it. If it prompts me to take action, I do. I will usually respond with an email of my own, summarizing said action and any [...]

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There is no such thing as confidential email. Or privileged. Or anything of the sort, despite the sentences or paragraphs that appear below many professionals’ signature blocks.
Google Apps has been in the news — and by news I mean Slashdot — lately. Apparently there are people concerned that law offices and medical practitioners are migrating [...]

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As of last night I’m getting PDF attachment spam and the filters aren’t getting them. Content analysis isn’t catching them because there’s nothing in the content of the email to analyze. Just the attachment. The subject always specifies the name of the attachment and sure enough the PDF is attached to the email. I receive [...]

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I know nothing about Erection PowerPack, nor do I care to. But it really pisses me off when bulk mailers use my domain to forge a return address for their spam mailings.
For the record, I don’t send out unsolicited email.
This morning I received several hundred bounce messages from dozens of systems, informing me that “my” [...]

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AOL and Yahoo! have both announced changes in policy that may affect your ability to receive list traffic from this system, at least in an unadulterated form.
A Quick Summary…
AOL (and likely Yahoo! as well) will be transitioning to a paid-sender program, which I have no plans to participate in. There may be an impact to [...]

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S/MIME message don’t interact well with RT. If you send an S/MIME email to the system, you will likely receive the nondescript “no value sent for required parameter ‘message’” error. The mail administrator will see EX_TEMPFAIL errors (if using Sendmail). One solution is to remove MIME data from incoming messages destined for RT.
The following was [...]

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A few days ago I received a few blank emails from my Nagios installation, with no content or indication what was wrong. After a quick glance I couldn’t detect anything wrong with its configuration. After a few minutes of breaking the problem down, I discovered that the problem wasn’t with Nagios at all.
The other day [...]

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The publishers of CRN — a monthly periodical billed as “Vital Information For VARs and Technology Integrators” — have allowed my email address to be either compromised, sold, or given away to spammers.
A technical consultant with an online presence, I receive numerous technical publications free of charge. The idea is that I’m in the position [...]

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Our primary mail exchanger (MX) receives the bulk of the mail for our domain. Within the past few months we’ve noticed an increase in the amount of mail delivered directly to our secondary MX. This is unusual, since the priority of the secondary (40) is set quite a bit higher than the primary (10). Of [...]

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At some point we noticed phantom entries in the Postfix mail log, mixed in with the rest of our valid mail. These phantom entries never took a long time to process, so we weren’t all that concerned about processor or bandwidth usage. Nevertheless after forcing yourself to ignore these useless entries for a while, you [...]

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SpamAssassin - while noble in its quest to rid our email of spam - takes time and bandwidth to run all of its RBL-based checks. The more we can filter out before the message is piped to SpamAssassin, the better. The latest batch of worms seems to be as good a target as any. I’m [...]

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