Greylisting

So one of my clients showed me some rejected mail she got when trying to send to a user whom she knew she had the right email address for.

The return mail was a “451 4.7.1 message delayed” error and had a link for http://greylisting.org. So I went to check it out thinking we were on some sort of deny list (IE, a blacklist).

Turns out, greylisting.org’s policy is to deay/block ALL incomming mail the first time from any source. They rely on the user trying a second time to allow the message through … I’m not making this up:

What happen is that each time a given mailbox receives an email from an unknown contact (ip), that mail is rejected with a “try again later”-message (This happens at the SMTP layer and is transparent to the end user). This, in the short run, means that all mail gets delayed at least until the sender tries again.

What the fuck? This is ludacris. If things keep going this direction then SMTP is due to become a proverbial paperweight, and we’ll go back to the days of faxes and carrier pidgens.

Furthermore, whoever came up with his “greylist” idea needs to be drug out into the street, shot in each join and told to walk to a hospital, where they’ll be rejected the first time and have to try again later.

May God have mercy on the soul of the internet.

myPod

I am now an official Apple product owner. Last Christmas, I bought an iPod Nano for Kerry and this year, her parents got her an iPod Touch, leaving the iPod Nano in my hands

When the iPod originally came out I had a lot to say against it, however of the years and generations, Apple has made changes in all the right directions. Battery life was one of my biggest concerns with the original iPod. I don’t mean the time between charges, but the overall life of the battery sucked and from what I understood was not covered under the warranty (although I can’t find any evidence of that now). But battery technology has made leaps and bounds in the past 5 years and while the battery in my iPod Nano isn’t technically “user-replaceable” its not impossible to do with some know how.

I had, and still do to some extent have a gripe with the price. Since this particular iPod was sort-of free. But there are some things the iPod has that justify the price. The internal memory seems to be really high quality and fast, which is a nice plus. I’ve owned a couple creative devices and transfer times (particularly of encrypted content) were horrendous.

So far it’s one of my favorite Christmas presents, and it’s inspired me to do some cleanup of the 35Gb of digital music I’ve had lying around, removing the crap I dont own or listen to and organizing all my data.

Remove a stuck print job in Windows

I have often recived a call, or gone out to a site where there is a print job stuck in the print que on the server that is holing up everything. You can try to cancel the job at the printer, or at the server. You’ve tried to restart the server and restart the printer but the print job just sits there staring at you the whole time. While not quite as bad as upsetting as the famed “PC LOAD LETTER” error it can still make you want to chuck your printer and/or computer off the roof.

So how do you purge the vexing print que? Its actually easier than you might think. It only takes three lines typed in to your command prompt (you can do it through the Windows GUI too, but its easier this way).

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New Client!

Haha! I don’t know how many of you know this, but I have my own little business that I do on the side managing small business Networks. Its pretty fun to be able to see how other people do things, and help them get done what needs to be done. Anyway, today I picked up my 4th client, Elite Power.

Its kind of funny how a word of mouth Company like mine spreads. I started with two clients that actually weren’t businesses, just personal users who needed some work done on their computers, basically a virus and spyware enema. Then when the engineer at the company I work for moved to a new firm he recommended me to his boss and that was client #3. Now with Elite I actually got connected with because my boss sent me over to their office as a favor from my company (so I got paid by EDC, not my own billing) and they felt I could help them out so they’ve asked me to give them a hand.

Now the only problem is as soon as school is out I’ll be back to 40 hour weeks at my regular job, so I think I’m going to have to talk with my boss about working 4-10 hour days and taking one day off to meet with my clients. I don’t expect this should be a problem, as I’ve already discussed something similar with him before and he is fine with it.

Anyway, its pretty exciting to actually BE a growing company. Just thought I would share. B)