fpsupport (was Re: segmentation violation in fp)

[Fairlight]

You'll never BELIEVE what Kenneth Brody said here...:
> Fairlight wrote:
> [...]
> > Well I guess it's a good thing I opened up my /dev/null rule for
> > Mailer-Daemon then, or I'd never have seen it.
> 
> If you /dev/null all bounces, how would you get "real" bounces?  I
> would think that you would at least whitelist your ISPs bouncer
> address, even if you blacklist everyone else's.

When I did it, I'd had enough.  I didn't -care- anymore.  Since Kelly and I
are the only ones that send legitimate mail from fairlite.com, and we
actually know what we're doing, I just said forget it, if I screw up, it's
my mistake.

Bill Vermillion and I were having a discussion about such miscellania
about a month ago and after that talk I decided to exchange it for a less
draconian block, so now if any of our legitimate addresses are also found
in the body of a bounce, we'll get them.

> > fairlite.com (for whatever reason) has been "hijacked" in several spam
> > campaigns, where they just spam a continent-load of people with
> > random-letter addresses like alkhgasdww at fairlite.com, and -I- get all the
> > bounces.
> 
> It happens to every domain at one time or another.  Rather than generating
> entire user at domain names, they send random usernames, but fix the domain
> name for a while.  Then they proceed to forge another domain name.

Yeah, but it's happened to me THREE times in the last year.  I'm...a
-little- peeved.  :)

> >  When it was >200/day, I tossed all mail from Mailer-Daemon
> > entirely out the window for a few months.  I only recently opened it back
> > up by putting additional body scanning in for a valid fairlite.com email
> > address that I'd have sent from.
> 
> At least that way, you get real bounces back.

Yeah.  Had I not been so ticked at the time, I'd probably have just done it
that way to begin with.  I had about had it though.  The odds of me
screwing up, since we either reply or use aliases for pretty much everything
are next to nil.  I tossed the baby with the bathwater for a while.
Probably foolishly, but I get maybe ten legitimate bounces a year.  I
figured at the time I could live with that rather than weeding through 200+
per day--compounded by the fact that many of those were multiple group
bounces with like 20 addresses at a time.

> > If it had still been blocked, I'd never have known about the change, nor
> > known to resend.  I had about as much reason to toss mailer-daemon as you
> > did to close the old support address.  :)
> 
> Well, as I said, the same would apply to any e-mail you sent that bounced
> for any reason.

Yeah, and I knew that.  But I alias everything in mutt.  There are very
rare instances where I'll ask someone for an email address while in irc
or the fP Room or somewhere, in which case I copy and paste.  I can't
remember the last time I had a legitimate bounce.  If someone screws up
their Reply-to: (or worse, their From:) header, and a reply bounces, well
that's just too bad.  :)

> I believe the "contact us" page on the website has the newer address on
> it.

I committed the address Jerry had given me to an alias.  :)  Lot of good it
did me.  *chuckle*  Who goes looking for contact information when one
already has it noted from earlier?

> Too bad we're not in a position to say "well, if they're not smart enough
> to read the plain English message telling them exactly what to do instead,
> we don't want to hear from them".  ;-)

Sure you are.  Everyone is.  It's a matter of whether or not one chooses
to.  I'm surely not rolling in money, but I have my tolerance threshholds
where it's just not worth it in some cases.  I've literally seen (when I
adminned the ISP) dozens (yes, dozens!) of users who would clog up the mail
queue with frozen messages that had noplace to go--the delivery address was
bad, and the sender didn't supply a valid From: address, so the MTA had
noplace to put it and they were marked frozen.  I wrote a program to flush
out those specific messages (you could discern the reason for freeze from
the formatting in the queue list) nightly.  If someone is -that- stupid or
ignorant, I'm not sure I really -want- to talk to them (and they probably
shouldn't be online in the first place). :-/

Sadly, the state things are in, well I have a friend who isn't a huge
technical person but who can at least configure their mail client.  But their
address was jim at somehost and they were getting -way- too much spam, so they
had their admin change it to james at somehost.  I told them next time to tack
on a string of numbers, etc., as james, being a plain common name, is pretty
damned likely to become unusable purely by brute-force spam attacks, even
if harvesters never touch it.  They said they'd keep that in mind next time
around when it came time to change it.

I'm not sure what to think about this SPF they're introducing.  I've
already had my ISP add what I needed to my zone.  When they roll out
support for it, I'm already set.  Hopefully before Oktober 1, as that's
when hotmail will start rejecting non-SPF mail, last I read.  Ugh, an MS
standard.  :-/

mark->
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