Tag Archives: email

My phone, my data or maybe not

Technology,

Read an interesting article about the IPhone and access to Microsoft Exchange Server email. The full article is Wipeout: When Your Company Kills Your iPhone and I found it on Slashdot. That seems a little extreme, but I guess when you think about it work email is the company’s not yours. I’ve yet to add work email setup to my phone. It might be another reason not to. I don’t have an IPhone, but Android phones have a MAPI email client for Exchange access, which is what mine runs. I’d have to assume it works the same way.

I’ll stick with browser access !!!

Moving to Gmail

Personal

It was about a year ago when I signed up for a Gmail account intending to use the Calendar service. At the time I had a number of things going on and was looking for a way to get at them where ever I was. It has worked out well be it at home on the PC, traveling with the laptop or at my finger tips on the communicator. So after my recent trials setting up fetchmail, dovecot, and ldap and then adding Squirrelmail and Spamassassin I thought “why not just use Gmail ?”.

It wasn’t the first time that had crossed my mind. I’ve followed their blog and read good things about features in other places but was never ready to “let go”… I guess. Well beginning of the year I decided to give it a try if it didn’t work out I could always go back.

It’s been a few months now and I’m enjoying it so far. Spam filtering is excellent and I’m getting use to the labeling vs folders. I even switched to the reader for blogs and news subscriptions. To deal with the “I want a copy on my server” just turn on imap and pull a copy via fetchmail. Using these instructions I was able to get that working with minimal effort. So for now Gmail it is.

Comcast using Zimbra

Technology, ,

A hockey buddy sent me a email recently where the mailer was reported as.

Mailer: Zimbra 5.0.9_GA_2533.RHEL5_64 (zclient/5.0.9_GA_2533.RHEL5_64)

I’ve always found it interesting what others use to manage their mail but I didn’t think he used open source, not to mention Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Zimbra. So that got me thinking he is a Comcast user and so am I, does Comcast use Zimbra ? I sent a message from my Comcast account then checked the mailer, nope it was AT&T Message Center. So I did some googling and sure enough I missed this one late last year.

The reason he has it and I don’t is it’s a feature of their Triple Play package, we only use TV and Internet. Regardless it’s pretty cool for open source software. I’ve been reading good things about Zimbra and was thinking about installing it on a test server about a month ago but never got to it. Five or six years ago when I was hosting my own mail server a product like this would have been sweet. Guess if I get crazy and want to go back I know now there’s a good option that’s free.

My email is spam, again

Technology

While in Costa Rica I tried to send a couple emails via my domain. I couldn’t get the ssh tunnel up to my server here at home so their was no way to forward it through Comcast, my ISP. A while ago I ran into the same problem when sending an email to some hockey buddies. I had hoped when my host did an upgrade this problem might go away, but I never got around to checking. Unfortunately it hasn’t as this time I got the following message.

554 The message was rejected because it contains prohibited virus or spam content

What this means is some providers might view an email coming from my domain as spam but I don’t have any control over that. The problem is when you use a host that has thousands of customers your site’s IP is the same as others. While you might not be sending spam someone else is and thus the reason we send through Comcast.

Just a minor annoyance but might be a good time for a new side project, to work out a solution when we’re away from home. Good thing this doesn’t come up to often.

My email is spam

Technology,

While replying to a fellow hockey players email this evening I ran across a strange mail delivery failed message.

    550-x.x.x.x blocked by ldap:ou=rblmx,dc=bellsouth,dc=net
550 Blocked for abuse.  See http://www.att.net/bls_rbl/ for information.

Thought that was rather strange, never been accused of sending spam before and keep a pretty close eye on what’s coming from my machines.

Following the link took me to three resources for third party spam detection databases. They were.
http://www.spamhaus.org/index.lasso
http://www.mail-abuse.com/index.html
http://ipremoval.sms.symantec.com/
When looking up my domain none reported the IP as being on any blacklist but when looking up my routers IP I got some interesting information. This is from mail-abuse.com.

January 20, 2003: If you are a COMCAST customer and are seeing messages that your IP address is on the MAPS DUL, please contact COMCAST directly. You may also want to review this page as well.

If you are a mail user with a standard mail client (such as Eudora, Pegasus Mail, Netscape Mail, or Outlook Express) and you can’t send mail because your IP address appears on the MAPS DUL, it is probably because your mail program is set to use a mail server other than the one your current Internet access provider provides you. Most ISPs usually prevent this type mail relay with their own anti-relay software, but depending on their configuration they may check the MAPS DUL before they check for unauthorized relay.

If you use a mail (SMTP) server on your own computer, or you share your Internet connection with several other people on a local network with a proxy server such as Whistle’s InterJet, and you can’t send mail because of this list, it is because your recipients cannot tell the difference between your legitimate mail delivery and a spammer’s trespassing on their equipment. However, there is a very easy way to work around the MAPS DUL and get your mail through, and it may even speed up your mail in the process.

How about that a message can be seen as spam if the smtp server sending the message is not in the domain of the source IP, i.e. an open mail relay. I guess that would make sense. I may have to start pushing mail through Comcast or switch to imap if this continues.