Getting a bit behind

[lnr]

Let's see, Tuesday I was late to see Occupational Health and then had a somewhat grotty day in the office. Can't recall what we did in the evening. Wednesday I took off sick, but managed to persuade Simon to kindly give me a lift to the pub, where I went through four different flavours of fruit juice drinks (apple and mango is winning I think) and a rather scrummy hot chocolate and helped our team to fail to get the booby prize. Then helped rjk hobble home. Today I more or less dragged myself out of bed and into the office by 10:30am, which is appallingly late, but I didn't really expect it to take an hour to get in on the bus. Must allow for this in future.

Spent the first half of the day wanting to weep into my keyboard in frustration, but then perked up a bit, sent a couple of mails to organise a couple of things and then spent the afternoon finding lots of Windows anti-spam tools, and beginning to have a look at their specs. Once I've narrowed it down to vaguely promising ones I'll start installing and testing. Looking for cheapness, effectiveness, being easy to install and use, and being usable with both POP and IMAP based clients, and not being horrible security holes (having their own wide-open SMTP proxies is not good) or encouraging users to do stupid things (like faking bounces to spam). It's a bit of a tough brief really, but given it's taking us forever to get anything like a sensible infrastructure to do serious stuff server-side it makes sense to try and find client-side applications which we can recommend to the stroppier users. Or we could just keep telling them to bog off and get hermes accounts instead I guess, but that feels like defeat.

Pleasant evening in with M&S chinese takeaway, and Spinal Tap on DVD (thanks love, a great present!) and then some pleasant geeking. And now I really must get to bed. And I still have no clue what to wear tomorrow. Oh well.

Comments

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

or encouraging users to do stupid things (like faking bounces to spam)

OK I'm a thicky. Why is this stupid?

[simont]

Because a lot of spam (not sure whether it's the majority, but it's certainly a sizable fraction) has a faked return path. So if you fake bounces, then (a) some of them will bounce in their own right because the faked return path you sent them to wasn't even valid, (b) those that don't bounce will hit innocent bystanders who have nothing to do with anything, (c) it will clog up everyone's mail systems even more, and (d) after all that it won't even achieve what was presumably your goal (i.e. getting off the spammers' address lists) since the actual spammers won't see your bounces.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Spam often has a forged return path, so the bounce often actually goes to some completely unrelated third party who is by this point being drowned in bounces to spam they didn't even send.

[mpinna.livejournal.com]

Spinal Tap truly rocks. I was inflicting the soundtrack albums on my housemates only this evening... :)

[(Anonymous)]

http://www.livejournal.com/community/dead_is_sexy/

[catyak]

Ideally you need an smtp-based filter a bit further upstream. That way you can nail the crap before it gets to your POP/IMAP server.

The US spammers have gone mad for Thanksgiving, my system bounced 220 spams in a ten-minute period between 4:10 and 4:20 this morning. Something over 300 in total since midnight.

D