Category computers

It seems that Comcast is blocking DreamHost’s outgoing MTA:

This is the Postfix program at host spunkymail-a8.dreamhost.com.

I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be
be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the attached returned message.

The Postfix program

<xxxxxxxx@comcast.net>: host gateway-r.comcast.net[204.127.198.26] said: 550
208.97.132.60 blocked by ldap:ou=rblmx,dc=comcast,dc=net -> BL004 Blocked
for spam. Please see
http://www.comcast.net/help/faq/index.jsp?faq=SecurityMail_Policy18628 (in
reply to MAIL FROM command)
Reporting-MTA: dns; spunkymail-a8.dreamhost.com
X-Postfix-Queue-ID: 4AFED10AA74
X-Postfix-Sender: rfc822; c0nsumer@nuxx.net
Arrival-Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2006 19:03:22 -0700 (PDT)

Final-Recipient: rfc822; xxxxxxxx@comcast.net
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0
Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; host gateway-r.comcast.net[204.127.198.26] said:
550 208.97.132.60 blocked by ldap:ou=rblmx,dc=comcast,dc=net -> BL004
Blocked for spam. Please see
http://www.comcast.net/help/faq/index.jsp?faq=SecurityMail_Policy18628 (in
reply to MAIL FROM command)

UPDATE: A bit more info. The Comcast page in the link above directs users to Symantec (yes, SYMANTEC) to report misidentified messages. It seems that Comcast now uses Brightmail for filtering.

I ssh’d to DreamHost and manually sent a message to a Comcast address (you know, the old ‘telnet mailhost 25’ thing) without problem. This was from jawbreaker.dreamhost.com, indicating that it’s not nuxx.net nor all of DreamHost which is blocked, just (at least one of) the MXs.

I filled out a trouble ticket with DreamHost, because they are the ones who will need to resolve this.

Hrm, I just tried to mail ‘s Comcast address and that worked. This is odd.

UPDATE 2: Now I’m not seeing any problems at all.

Another reason why DreamHost could be called crap:

They block some email based on a non-user-configurable blacklist. The domains americastestkitchencorp.com and dm-4.com are two such domains blocked in this manner. The problem? americastestkitchencorp.com is the company which runs America’s Test Kitchen on PBS, and dm-4.com is used to send travel confirmations for those traveling on Princess Cruises.

If Junk Filtering is turned on, mail from (at least) these two domains will be blocked, regardless of the user’s settings for mail tagging and quarantine. The only way to keep mail from those domains from being blocked is to proactively whitelist them.

That is a stupid way to run things.

What the hell?

jawbreaker:~> mysql -uc0nsumer -hmysql.nuxx.net -p nuxx_net
Enter password:
Reading table information for completion of table and column names
You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A

Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 1125434 to server version: 5.0.18-standard-log

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> select * from mw_user;

...

1 row in set (18.07 sec)

mysql>

Anyone want to know what’s been going on with DreamHost?

Read this: http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/08/01/anatomy-of-an-ongoing-disaster/

So. DreamHost is disappointing me again. I’m within about a day of dropping $1300 (and 2.5x per month) on a 1U server and going back to colocation with Waveform.

This is pissing me off.

UPDATE: Yep, looks like MySQL problems.

More and more I’m finding myself wanting an email client which doesn’t have folders for sorting things, but instead has ‘views’. That is, everything goes into one giant bucket and where one would normally find folders there are what amount to canned search queries. For example, ‘LJ’ for all things from LiveJournal, or maybe ‘Honda’, for all messages which contain the string Honda.

Still having folders available would be good for some, but I’m not sure I’d use it.

I’m fairly certain newer versions of Outlook almost meet all these requirements… But why not Mail.app or some other simpler mail client?

< sigh >