blog.arithm

Now that the Senate has decided to grant retroactive immunity to the telecoms (video), it probably won’t be long before the Bush Administration starts routinely tracking your search habits, mining your email, and monitoring your phone calls.  This kind of automated profiling will allow the NSA to determine, among other things, your propensity for terror.  Yes, soon the Bush Administration will be protecting us all from ourselves.

But I say, why wait?! I want the Bush Administration to protect me from myself right now!  Am I a subversive?  Could I be a terrorist?  I need to know!  And I’m sure you do as well.

That’s why I have started automatically carbon copying all of my email to George W. Bush.  Okay, well, technically I’m carbon copying them all to Dick Cheney because it would appear that Cheney reads Bush’s email for him.  But I have every confidence that Mr. Cheney will keep the president abreast of my goings on.

If you’re a Microsoft Outlook user, here’s how you too can automatically carbon copy all of your email to the White House.

1. In Mail, on the Tools menu, click Rules and Alerts.
2. On the E-mail Rules tab, click New Rule.
   
3. In the Rules Wizard dialog box, under Start from a blank rule, click Check messages after sending, and then click Next.
4. Click Next.
5. A confirmation will appear, notifying you that this rule will apply to every message that you send. Click Yes.
6. Under Step 1: Select action(s), select the Cc the message to people or distribution list check box.
   
7. Under Step 2: Edit the rule description (click an underlined value), click people or distribution list.
8. In the Rule Address dialog box, click a name or distribution list, and then click To. Repeat this step until all names or distribution lists you want to add are included in the To box.
9. Click OK.
10. In the Rules Wizard dialog box, click Next.
11. Click Next.
12. Under Step 1: Specify a name for this rule, enter a name that you will recognize for this rule.
    
13. Click Finish.

That’s it!  Now all of your email will be automatically carbon copied to Dick Cheney at the White House, who will update President George W. Bush, who will work with the NSA to figure out if you are a terrorist or not.  Because, let’s face it, who knows what you’re capable of?  Act now before it’s too late!

I’d seen this happen occasionally over the last couple of months, but it seemed to get really bad on Friday.

Fri Mar 21 21:31:45 2008 -> SelfCheck: Database modification detected. Forcing reload.
Reading databases from /var/lib/clamav
ERROR: reload db failed: Unable to lock database directory (try 1)
ERROR: reload db failed: Unable to lock database directory (try 2)
ERROR: reload db failed: Unable to lock database directory (try 3)
ERROR: reload db failed: Unable to lock database directory
Terminating because of a fatal error.
Socket file removed.
Pid file removed.
--- Stopped at Fri Mar 21 21:38:16 2008


Not entirely sure what the problem is, but it seems like clamav is choking on recent updates from freshclam.

And apparently I’m not the only one. Took advice from this thread and updated clamav to the version in debian-volatile. The official ClamAV documentation also recommends using the volatile repositories.

I’m new to Debian and almost took this to mean that I should use etch. Good to know that Debian maintains a volatile repository. To pull packages from volatile, just add:

deb http://volatile.debian.net/debian-volatile etch/volatile main contrib non-free
(though preferably use a mirror)

to /etc/apt/sources.list. Running a simple apt-get update clamav or aptitude update clamav will find and install the appropriate volatile updates. Nice.

Who says spam can’t be fun?

10. think over your agregate size

9. Enormous device is your treasure

8. Improbable effect on your phallus!

7. Your measurement of success is by the INCH.

6. I carry a bazooka in my pants, walking around.

5. Your little soldier will grow up to a big love general!

4. inches in your pants will make you the world’s 8th wonder to women.

3. Why be a tiny cocktail sausage, when you can be a mighty wiener.

2. Behind every great man lies a huge secret in his pants.

And the number one spam subject tag line that has actually caused me to pause and seriously consider penis enlargement…

1. Be the master of the universe, with a huge broadsword in your pants?

You know, I’ve thought over my agregate size and.. sure, why not? By the Power of Greyskull!

The spam hitting one of our mail servers is getting completely out of control. Since this particular server is more of a mailing list broker, exclusively for Japan, rather than try to fight the influx of global spam — which lately even traditional filters and blocklists seem to be ineffective against — we’ve decided to simply not accept email from anywhere except Japan itself.

Andreas Plesner Jacobse maintains an excellent set of geo blocklists, the DNSBL. Turned this on against some of the more naughty spam countries last week. In Postfix for example:

reject_rbl_client cn.countries.nerd.dk

Bye bye China.

Anyway, so far so good. Spam has gone from hundreds (maybe thousands) of messages slipping through our traditional filters each day to a small trickle of Japan-originated spam.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to maintain a large enterprise email farm. Maybe like trying to grow corn on a plantation overrun by an ever surging plague of locusts!

Unless you set local_recipient_maps to nothing, just so:

local_recipient_maps =
luser_relay = some@address.com


Postfix will ignore the luser_relay setting and winge at you.

Documentation is tucked away at the bottom of the page here.

Finally got around to figuring out how to make pfqueue to run on Redhat. Though I never did get it to install and run from source, today I stumbled upon a copy in Dag Wieers repository. Simply install Dag’s build and, if you are using Postfix, make sure that the Posftix commands are in your path (I had to add /usr/sbin/to mine.)

Thank you Dag.

This always turns out to be much more difficult than it should be. Part of the problem is that there are many, many more email clients out there in common use than there are web browsers. And all of these email clients either use their own subset of HTML or, in the case of webmail, special filters that attempt to convert HTML-ized messages into a “sanitized” format.

Here’s some basic rules of thumb to follow:

• Drop the doctype and head section.
• Keep it simple. No fancy table nesting.
• However, do use tables for positioning, rather than CSS.
• If using CSS, keep it inline, or better yet avoid CSS altogether and use tags to apply style. (Pretend that it’s 1998 and stylesheets don’t exist.)
• Avoid background images.
• Call images from the server; don’t attach.
• Don’t link to documents secured by SSL.
• Use images as links if you want them to stand out in a color other than blue.
• Encode Japanese in JIS (iso-2022) for widest email client support.
• Before you hit that send button, test, check, test and check again, and.. Pray.

Unlike a correction to a web page, you can’t do a quick edit and “take back” what you just put out there. And because you’re pushing information at people rather than allowing them to pull it on their own terms, if the information is not relevant and easy to see, some folks could even become a bit angry. Or potentially very.. very… angry. Expect a call or two. Hoo boy.

For more information, Xavier Frennette has a terrific blog post outlining the types of CSS support in various webmail clients. The folks at Campaign Monitor have followed up with an increadibly thorough chart of all the popular clients. Definitely worth a look.

Finally, consider marketing webmail service. I am. More and more of these are popping up; for a small fee you can offload much of this heavy design lifting to them.

I’ve been running a 空メール server for a number of years. As one might expect with a rule-based automated email reply system.. once in awhile the thing goes absolutely berserk. Usually I have to flop around the Internet trying to recover the commands I use (and promptly forget) to tame acid-tripping Postfix.

And generally this just boils down to postqueue -p to see what’s flying through and/or stuck in the queue and then postsuper -d ALL to clean it out.

Today, while tidying up, I came across pfqueue, a “console-based tool for handling MTA queues”. Looks great. Promptly tried it out and, surprise, surprise, while it emerges effortlessly on Gentoo, make install fails on my flavor of RedHat.

Need to figure this out. This tool could save me a ton of time.