Willy Dobbe - smtp

please remove your site in my computer l dont want it

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 11:51:13 +0200

please remove your site in my computer. i dont want it

— Someone sending this message to the webmaster mailing list of Drupal.org

Re: in mail does NOT mean REPLY

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 11:25:11 +0100

When you reply a mail, you will find that most if not all mailclient put "Re:" before the subject. Some brainded mailclients even did this when it was already a "Re:" resulting in subjects like "Re: Re: Re: subject".

I sometimes get mail from even more braindead mailclients and server that are kind of localized and put "ANTW" ("antword", german for answer, read "reply") in the subject. Which will result in nice headers like "Re: Antw: Re: subject".

The most stupid thing is not that some mailclients are braindead and dont use internet standard. Thats only part of the problem, you can hardly call correct quoting a standard if the most used mail program (and hence users) dont get it anymore.

The most stupid thing is that the developers of the mailclients dont know what the "Re:" in the subject line means. It doesnt mean "Reply"!

See about.com:

"Re" is an abbreviated form of the Latin "in re", which, "re" being the ablative case of "res" (thing), means "concerning" or "in the matter of"

See also webster. So all you braindead localized mail developers, stop replying and start building something that is useful! Now comment on this with a funny subject line

Turing, Drupal and multi media spam

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 21:59:21 +0100

Recently I chatted with an unnamed friend on how to prevent spam. Since this site has a rather high pageranking, it gets into spammed a lot. During such a spamstorm, the load of this poor Pentium 166 goes through the roof. Ever type "w" on a Unix system just to see "80" after 5 minutes?

While none of the spam postings get published, the losers still try to dump their referrer spam, trackback spam and most of all comment spam. With web 2.0 (whatever that is) the landscape of (anti) spam tools will change as well. Where the "Web 1.0" used to be a read web, now it has become a read/write web. Where "write" isn’t per se defined as text. And there is where its gets complicated.

Comment spam can be prevented. In Drupal (the CMS underneath this site) you can use (graphical) captcha’s, blacklisting, moderation and dozen of other tools to prevent the spammers from getting thru and even block them before they post. But the "write" part of Web 2.0 doesn’t have to be restricted to "comments" or "postings". Since user can upload and share just about anything, we will see an increase in other spam postings, porn video’s, Viagra audio’s or Rolex pictures. Every knife has two sides; it can be used for the good and the bad. And with the good "user generated content" bad "spambot generated content" is bound to happen.

Spam comments can relative easy be recognized, for example by services like askimet. It gets more complicated with non text content. How do you fingerprint an audio posting and recognize it as off topic / spam? Spammer can easy make zillion variations of a picture with some text in it, dumping an URL in a random place, randomly curved and with a random font. How do you tag this as spam? E-mail spam has increased a lot the last half year with this kind of graphical text spam messages obfuscated with random lines around it and this kind of spam has been very successful getting thru to the "inbox" of most users.

This brings us to a new field; call it reverse captcha’s or something. Computers recognizing computer generated images with spam text/ URL’s. And the audio field is even completely blank, a greenfield where much work will have to be done to make Web 2.0 a success.

The first companies starting to work on recognizing copyrighted video material are already booming. But that is just the "holywood" part getting in, the low hanging fruit of the scared copyrightholders. A lot more work has to be done before we can differentiate people and hence users generated content from bots hence bot generated content.

I think the ultimate Turing test will be to be able to differentiate a real blog posting from a sponsored blog posting. But maybe that is beyond the power of a computer since even people find it hard to tell the difference. Sure, we can see that the new Bond lives in a Sony dominated world, but can you see the difference between the previous posting on this site -which was not sponsored- and this posting on this site which was brought to you by the friendly people of Drupal Inc?

Email is the place where knowlegde becomes information!

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 03:54:48 +0100

Many people have said that "email is a place where knowledge goes to die"

It is not! Email is the place where knowledge becomes information. It is up to the client (both the person and the software) to retrieve this information and make it into knowledge again. ESB's, CMS-es, Mac's spotlight, GMail and even Vista can help to make place this information in to a semantic rich environment and make it more powerful to use this information.

Gmail adds new features

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 20:36:48 +0100

Gmail adds new features. Now with a small drop down button that is rather nifty and handy IMHO.

Sure. Web2.0 and perpetual beta are 90% meaningless hype words, but fact is that microsoft comes with a new outlook every 3 years, hosted ASP / webbased mail can have a new version every day.

SPF, Spam, Google and underscores in hostname

Sun, 09 Jul 2006 03:38:03 +0200

So since a couple of days I am using Gmail for my boerland.com domain. I like it. How much? Well, think gmail... Thats it. Plus you can create 25 accounts within your domain for free (no catchall (yet?)) and you can have distributed rights on who can maintain the users. Nicely done. With extreem cool anti spam feautres like gmail has.

Speaking of, since I was changing my DNS entry, I though I might as well add more anti spam features zo my zone using spf. I used this msft tool thingy to make up the TXT field. And then change it a lot because it is a stupid tool (you can make longer entries than the TXT field can hold )

So I created this entry

boerland.com    text = "v=spf1 a mx mx:google.com a:willydobbe.xs4all.nl a:aspmx.googlemail.com mx:upsilon.pair.com ~all"

And yes, that does validate.

But before I know the syntax of the Gmail hosts, I needed to lookup the configs from the Google site.

Google says one should add "include:aspmx.googlemail.com". So I checked aspmx.googlemail.com and got:

aspmx.googlemail.com text = "v=spf1 redirect=_spf.google.com"

I re-read that line. And re-read it. That cant be true! Only loooooosers sysadmins of old NT boxes make such a stupid mistake!

But yes, that does include Google it seems.

_spf.google.com text = "v=spf1 ip4:216.239.56.0/23 ip4:64.233.160.0/19 ip4:66.249.80.0/20 ip4:72.14.192.0/18 ?all"

That might look like a smart way of using A record, redirecting and TXT field, but do checkout the underscore in the hostname! An underscore in a hostname!

Google are you barking mad?

Only letters, digits, and dash characters are legal in hostnames. Special characters other than the dash (and the dot between components) are not allowed in the hostname designation although cohesion may cause them to appear. Underscore characters are commonly used by Windows systems but according to RFC-952 they are not allowed. The use of the underscore has caused many subtle problems in systems that connect to the wider world...

(wikipedia, see also rfc 952)

Gmail for my boerland.com/org

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 09:00:33 +0200

I havent used my own email accounts at boerland.com and .org since a couple of years. I dont use mail that much anyway anymore privatly. Gmail filled a small gap and I really like it a lot.

"yes I am a choosen one!" I can host my MX record of boerland.com/org to a google mailserver and use Gmail for boerland.com!

Welcome to our beta test!
Thanks for helping us test Gmail for your domain! We're excited to help you offer Gmail accounts with your domain.

I'll setup all things next week and blog about this new Google Service later

BTW: It seems to be very pop ro bash google under MSFT lusers. Yes Google knows a lot about me, my bookmarks of my browser is stored with them, my browser shows the pagerank of the site sI am visting hence google knows where I surf, Google adsense knows what I click, Google adsense on this site knows what people visit my site, Googlebot indexes what I write on my blog, Gmail knows what I send and receive and now also for my own domains.

But still, choosing between two bad ones, I choose the one I havent try before

en weer wordt er meer eu geld verbrand

Mon, 29 May 2006 19:29:54 +0200

Op de gemakkelijke manbijthond site nu.nl: EU onderzoekt mogelijkheid btw op e-mail en sms

Op een verzonden e-mail zou 0,00001 cent belasting worden geheven. Voor het versturen van een sms'je ligt het bedrag beduidend hoger, dat zou 1,5 cent moeten worden. Volgens Lamassoure is dat een laag tarief, maar kan het voor de Europese Unie veel opleveren, omdat dagelijks miljarden berichten verzonden worden. Daarnaast meent hij dat een dergelijke belasting gemakkelijk te innen is.

Aaaah! Waarom zijn peopleincharge altijd zo clueless? Ik bedoel: 1 / 100.000 cent per mail. Heeft die persoon wel in de gaten hoe duur billing is? Enkel de kosten van het meten hiervan -los van waar en hoe je dat meet en wie je daartoe verplicht stelt- bedragen enkele centen per mail. "Gemakkelijk te innen". Sure. Maar wel met een overhead die factor 100.000.000 is. Ga je elke ISP verplicht alles laten meten? Ook bedrijven? En ik neem aan alleen versturende parytijen. Nu kan 80% van alle exchange "beheerders" de doos noulijks beheren om spam tegen te gaan, laat staan als ze dat wat ze niet kunnen voorkomen ook nog moeten tellen en billen. En als ik mijn eigen mailserver draai? En als mail uit buiten-eu komt? En waarom bTw, wat is de toegevoegde waarde waarover er mail geheven wordt.

Aaaah! Waarom zijn peopleincharge altijd zo clueless?

How to get lots of emailaddresses and private information

Tue, 14 Mar 2006 15:10:55 +0100

Dont get me wrong, I think it might be a useful service. And I do think the idea of haveing a graphicaql "traceroute" of mail is very good. But please. Nobody in his right mind is going to paste a complete email, or even all the headers to an unknown site? The best way to give your inbox to strangers IMHO and a great way to loose your email addresses to potential spammers. Having said that, Email graphic traceroute is a cool service.

Paste an email with full headers (we need the 'Received' lines). It will (we hope) trace the path your email message took as it passed through various servers, on Google maps.

Yahoo! mail demo

Tue, 21 Feb 2006 03:50:55 +0100

Yahoo mail isn't up to GMail (just like Yahoo search is second to Google search), but they do have a nice flash demo of their Y! Mail application.

gmail at boerland.com?

Sat, 11 Feb 2006 20:47:10 +0100

A new BETHHAAAA of GOOG, Gmail for your domain. So now I can use my own domains and store at gmail. Kewl!

Funny Spam T Shirt

Mon, 19 Dec 2005 05:03:14 +0100

Buy this funny spam tshirt, Just in Time for Christmas at cafepress

Yahoo and Google. Fight!

Mon, 07 Nov 2005 21:29:32 +0100

It seems taht Yahoo! has been building a new webbased mail interface to beat Gmail. And it seems that Yahoo has (some kind of?) humour. They created an alpha geek statue with a plaque saying:

"Presented to the Yahoo! Mail Team by the good people of Yahoo! in recognition of tremendous intellectual effort put forth in order to defeat Gmail.
Not since the code breakers in Britain's Bletchley Park deciphered Germany's Enigma code during World War II has so much brainpower been focused on kicking an enemy's ass."

That all is complimented with a "kiss this" sticker.

According Godwin's Law Yahoo! lost and Google wins. I like a comment in one of the flickr postings:

How come we never see Google doing this sort of thing?

And then the best answer you can get:

Because Google left puberty a long time ago.

Despite all this, Yahoo! is getting back. And even /me starts to use Y! every now and then... (via)

Spam Shirt

Sat, 09 Apr 2005 16:52:57 +0200

SPAMSHIRT - We love you!. Just select your shirt style, size and colour, then choose a spam message to grace the front. This can be taken from our list of spam, or you can enter one of your own. Send us your payment details, and you will receive your very own spamshirt in days. See below for some examples or use the spamshirt generator to create your own design.
"B@ckGammon" or "P0k3r" anyone?

Spam Spam Spam

Sun, 06 Feb 2005 09:07:46 +0100

Willy gets hit rather hard by the spam bots who target [g:drupal]. But Jermeys (of kerneltrap.org) excellent spam.module doesnt need black or whitelistening like MT does; it has baysian fingerprinting. And it works!

This site has had a combined total of 371 spam comment and spam node
postings, 305 of which were automatically detected by the spam filter.
This suggests a filter accuracy of 82.21%. The last spam posting to
this site was at 8:23 am on Sunday, February 6, 2005.To date, the spam filter has learned from 368 spam and 587 non spam postings.

There were a couple of thousend more spamcomments some time ago on willy, but I did some funky-for-beginners SQL statements to mass delete them.