Data Circle

I get a ridiculous amount of spam (500+ emails/day), most of which is caught by Spamassasin. However, this takes its toll on my poor virtual machine, which has most of its 250MB of RAM eaten up by MySQL as it is. As a result, I’ve started to be more aggressive with the rules I apply to incoming mail, which include:

1. Reject anything from an invalid hostname.
2. Reject emails where the sender address is a non-existant domain.
3. Reject where the recipient address is a non-existant domain.
4. Reject where the domain is hosted on this server but the email address is invalid (e.g. iveabigone@roguestudents.com).
5. Check against Spamhaus RBL.
6. Greylist.

Naturally, open relaying is disabled too. I’ve also updated the DNS for all of my domains so that they only have one MX record, as secondary servers are prone to abuse and can’t usually check whether an individual address is deliverable until they pass the message on to the primary server. Greylisting has proved to be particularly effective—personally I’m not a big fan of this solution as it introduces unnecessary delays, but the trade off between mail arriving a bit later and the amount of time I have to spend dealing with spam means that enabling it is now a no-brainer.

I could increase the level of checks by rejecting mail from servers without a reverse DNS record or which don’t identify themselves correctly in HELO/EHLO, but unfortunately that impacts too much on legitimate mail from people who can’t configure servers properly.

Since implementing these checks, my spam has fallen from 500 messages per day to about 10 per day, a reduction of 98%, even though my mail server is still receiving the same number of incoming connections. Furthermore, I’m no longer seeing “out of memory” error messages on my virtual machines, which is a great relief as this usually meant downtime until I noticed the problem, followed by a reboot.

Yes, I know I could just set my MX records to Google and let Gmail do all the work for me, but I don’t like the idea of a company in the US who I have absolutely no control over holding all of my emails and performing data mining on them.

Thunderbird 1.5 RC2 via Forever Geek

The second release candidate of the Mozilla Thunderbird browser has been pushed out, and I imagine that it can’t be long before 1.5 becomes the stable version based on the release pattern for Firefox. The update process this time was much smoother, and I think the Mozilla team really have been working on this. It’s a feature that gets mentioned quite often, but it’s only in recent releases of Firefox and Thunderbird that I’ve actually seen it work properly.

You can find a summarised list of the new features in the release notes, although one in particular that I like is:

Sort address autocomplete results by how often you send e-mail to each recipient.

Like all the best ideas, this is such a simple concept, but I imagine an extremely useful one for anyone with a large address book or who sends lots of emails. Unfortunately it’s probably not something most people will notice, so I imagine the feature will be considered useful but whoever added it won’t really get the credit they deserve, which is a shame.

Anyway, if you’re following the 1.5 release you should be able to update your copy of Thunderbird by simply going to Help->Check for updates and allowing the update manager to take it from there. If you’re still using the 1.0.x series you might want to wait a while until the stable version of 1.5 is released and most of the bugs have been ironed out, although personally I’ve not noticed any show stopping problems and I’d recommend an upgrade to 1.5 RC2 for most people.

Hot on the heels of the Firefox release candidate is the a release at the same stage in the development process for the Thunderbird mail client. There are an awful lot of new features mentioned in the release notes, although most of them won’t affect a lot of users (e.g. Kerberos Authentication).

From a personal point of view, I haven’t noticed any improvements so far, but then I generally use mutt to read my email. I hope the software update function has been fixed though, because when I tried using it to update to the release candidate I was told that Thunderbird couldn’t verify the integrity of the patch so was going to download the whole thing, then it just hung there indefinitely. In the end I just went to the Mozilla web site and downloaded it manually instead.

Due to a dispute with London-based Independent International Investment Research, who claim to have been using the Gmail name before Google launched their service on April 1st, 2004, the Google email service has now been rebranded as Google Mail for the foreseeable future. Users signing up as of this Wednesday 19th October will be offered a @googlemail.com address, although Google has said that existing @gmail.com addresses will continue to work for the time being. This only affects users in the UK, which presumably Google determines by IP address blocks.

A lot of Google fans have been raving about how unfair this is and how IIIR are pulling a fast one by trying to register Gmail as a trademark everywhere, but in this case I have no sympathy for either side. Google’s lawyers should have done a proper search for the trademark before launching the service, and they only have themselves to blame if they failed to notice that someone else had already applied for a trademark on the name. As for IIIR, it does look as if they’re trying to capitalise somewhat on the success of Gmail and one wonders whether or not they would have made the same amount of fuss had a smaller company infringed their intellectual property.

I’m not too bothered myself about this, because I don’t really use my Gmail account and it’s still working for the moment anyway, but I can see how it would really annoy all the people in the UK who have switched to using their Gmail account from other free email providers because of the huge mailbox capacity and the lack of intrusive advertising.

Update: We’ve been picked up by CNET as part of the blog community response to the Gmail name change. Unfortunately they’ve gone through our quote and replaced the words with American spellings.

More information

• BBC News
• Beta News