More mail

[lnr]

Actually I think I know what the problem is. I don't really want to move to Gmail at all, it's just the thing I'm using at the moment as a workaround for the main problem. And that's that I want mail to me at chiark to just work. That's my published contact address. It has been for a year or two, since I finally decided to retire the lspace one. I don't want to have to change it again.

I guess that means trying to work out how the hell SAUCE works so I can write a patch for it to hopefully make the hotmail problem become a thing which is ignored by those who (like me) have configured their address to be checked in lax mode, where it only warns about things rather than rejecting mail.

And think about the official address change for the future. Whether it's to go back to a forwarding address which I can move around with supplier, or to make eleanorb@slimy be my official one and possibly have the same problem again in the future.

Comments

[angoel.livejournal.com]

This is the main reason I have a gmail address - it's a usable address that I can throw at shopping sites / friends that bounce off chiark / etc. with a highly effective spam filter.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

What exactly is the hotmail problem, how is its mail being rejected?

[senji.livejournal.com]

The current-most-critical problem (as described by sysadmin in his news article on the subject) is that hotmail gets bored whilst SAUCE is trying to do MAIL FROM verification callout, so by the time that SAUCE has given up on doing the callout (so that it doesn't exceed the RFC-specified timeout) hotmail has gone away and so can't deliver the mail.

The reason why SAUCE is taking so long to do the callout is that some hotmail MXs don't respond at all, and the ones which do respond incorrectly give an error indication at the end of the callout. This wouldn't be a problem however (beyond a slight delay in mail delivery times) if hotmail waited for the RFC-specified time before getting bored and going home.

[lnr]

Ha, I've just tried emailing hotmail and I'll see if they can get back to me about it at all.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

But they won't be able to reply!

[lnr]

*grin* That's why I mailed them from my Gmail account :-)

[lnr]

Even more impressively they have in fact already mailed me back. Less so they want to know what the bounce message Mike gets says, though I think that won't help much. Of course usually that would be the answer.

[imc.livejournal.com]

Hotmail users seem to be able to send mail here though, even though Oxmail uses sender callout verification (as well as recipient verification, I'm pretty sure). I guess it must treat the responses differently. It's using Exim 4.62.

[lnr]

Perhaps it doesn't bother with rset before quitting? Or ignores the output from rset?

[lnr]

Initially it was thought to be just a problems with sender verification:

mail from: <>
250 <>....Sender OK
rcpt to: <mendoza_is_god@hotmail.com>
250 mendoza_is_god@hotmail.com
rset
554 Transaction failed
Connection closed by foreign host.

That 554 is technically not allowed by the spec, and causes chiark to think the address probably doesn't work.

It turns out there are other issues which combined with this cause the actual rejection. Chiark takes the odd response as a sign of a broken server and tries hotmail's other MXes. Some of these MXes are unreachable which slows down the verification and hotmail times out it's attempted delivery before SAUCE has decided it couldn't verify the address. There's a discussion of the problem in chiark.service, in the thread which is initially entitled "Sauce delaying e-mail replies".

And actually re-reading that it seems a patch is not appropriate, since SAUCE is doing the right thing at every point, and all of this is before it even know who the recipient is, so can't be done differently for lax/non-lax addresses.

[perdita-fysh.livejournal.com]

If a pop account somewhere else (other than gmail) will help in anyway I can give you one (ooer) on my server no problem. I've not paid sufficient attention to this series of posts to understand if that will help at all though *&)

[lnr]

Thanks for the offer, but it's OK, I can already get mail from all the people I want to talk to, just not where I want it!

[sparrowsion]

What happens to the spam levels on your coriolis address if you filter out anything with an RBL warning? (My experience suggests that RBL catches about 80+% of spam, with a similar false-positive rate to SAUCE.)

[lnr]

RBL + (SAUCE or coriolis) = binned unseen
SAUCE + coriolis = binned unseen
SAUCE or RBL alone -> spam folder
coriolis alone -> coriolis folder
none of the above (and not special case) -> INBOX

The vast majority of junk mail is binned unseen, mostly because of the RBL (50 overnight last night). The Spam folder has occasional false positives, and a fair bit of spam, say 10-15 overnight. The coriolis folder has slightly less spam than that, say 5-10 overnight, and no false positives. 2 or 3 spam messages make it through to the INBOX. I'm a bit fuzzy on numbers because I only log the stuff deleted unseen, and I delete the rest once I've decided it's spam.

(There are some other complications, but that's the basics)

[imc.livejournal.com]

You didn't ask me, but I do have numbers, so.

Last 16 days: 1649 filtered out, 1136 let through (of which 19 turned out to be spam). As a rule I don't check the filtered-out mail unless I'm expecting something that didn't turn up, but the false positive rate is on the order of one a month.

DNSBL listings filtered out 539 of the spams. I had to exclude spamcop.net from this rule as it was generating too many false positives (gmail seems to get itself listed quite often).

The Bcc rule, which is checked before DNSBL gets at it, filtered out 492. So that's a success rate of at least 32% and at most 63% for the DNSBL rule.

SpamAssassin was the third highest at 309, but that only looks at the spam after the above two rules and a number of others which took out a further 185. The remaining 124 were nobbled by my keyword scoring filter, which comes last in the chain.

[scat0324.livejournal.com]

I highly recommend buying a domain - although it would mean changing your published address again, it's probably the last time you'd have to do it, since if you change service provider in the future, the address will follow.

I'd also recommend hosting your domain with http://www.blackcat.net.uk/ for now, since they are competent and accessible - and provide IMAP and webmail access to their hosted e-mail accounts.

[lnr]

Actually the thing I'm considering is getting eleanor@the-blairs.co.uk (which my parents bought earlier this year for exactly that reason) to point at slimy, and then making that the current published address. That would remove much of the problem I think, but I still don't *want* to change my address.

Black Cat are certainly a good thing, though a long way from the cheapest at what they do. I already have one domain bought through them, and with web hosting on chiark (http://www.anns-birthday.org.uk/). So it does rather amuse me to have them recommended.

[bjh21.livejournal.com]

Addressing your last musing, a couple of years ago, I concluded that the best way for me to get a long-term stable email address was to get my own domain and then host it wherever was convenient. .me.uk domains cost less than £5 per year through Black Cat (http://www.blackcatnetworks.co.uk/services/domains), and hosting a mail domain on chiark isn't difficult.

[(Anonymous)]

£5 a year is still TWICE what 1&1 charge (£1.99). I don't understand why people recommend BlackCat when they are so overpriced.

[bjh21.livejournal.com]

Because, in my case, I'm an ignorant monkey who doesn't know any better. And £1.78 a year really isn't worth the effort of changing from someone I know to be competent.