Nature and the mind, never cease to amaze. Nice collection of things people have seen in the clouds. You couldn’t Photoshop this if you tried.
Music: The Residents :: La La
When Good Mail Goes Bad
Great way to wrap up a holiday: Agreed to take on a new Birdhouse client – a mid-size company who’s had a horrible email experience with their previous “top tier” provider. They had a dozen or so addresses; could we take them on? No problem. The old host had been storing a couple weeks worth of their mail, but there was no way to get it through to the mail exchanger for delivery. The old host agreed to relay it all to Birdhouse for processing.
That’s when things turned ugly.
Turns out the previous host didn’t have the basic common sense to discard mail to unknown addresses on the domain (it hasn’t been feasible to accept mail for unknown names, like balloon345@domain.com) for years. But they were not only accepting it all; they relayed it ALL to Birdhouse.
300,000 messages worth, 95% of which was theoretically discardable.
Unfortunately, discarding crap mail isn’t trivial when parsing a queue that large. Needless to say, things came to a grinding halt. Complicating matters was the fact that Birdhouse actually utilizes two mail queues: One for MailScanner, which pre-processes spam, and another for Exim, which is the actual mail transfer agent. The MailScanner queue was so large we couldn’t even get things out into the Exim queue. Exim documentation assumes a single queue, and MailScanner doesn’t offer the same range of queue management options that Exim does.
Which meant I got to script a solution, examining each messages on the pre-que to determine whether it was destined for a valid or invalid address, and dropping it if invalid.
The script is running now, but will take a while. All spectacularly unpleasant. Once again, wanting to skewer a spammer or two and painfully aware of how much of my time is consumed by fighting bad guys.
Progress updates on the Birdhouse System Status page.
Music: Andy Bey :: I Let a Sing Fo Out of My Heart
Hang On Sloopy
When I was a boy, one of the things I loved about driving through the Bay Area was looking for the amazing sculptures people created and planted in the mud flats and low tidal areas around area highways and bridges. There are far fewer of those around these days than there once were, but there are still a few, if you know where to look. Yesterday Miles and I found a few good ones while geocaching around the Emeryville Marina, including this excellent biplane just beyond arm’s reach from the end of a pier at the base of the marina peninsula.
The GPSr pointed to a spot somewhere just beyond the plane’s cockpit, which explained why the cache was rated a 4.5 on the terrain scale – one of the more difficult ones I’ve attempted (yay adrenaline!).
Absolutely gorgeous caching day, and booty everywhere. At the end of the day, sun going down and the sky turned absolutely electric. One of the most gorgeous sunsets of my life, and the vista was 180 degrees of perfect.
Me: Miles, this is one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen. No, wait, *you’re* one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen.
Miles: Yeah, but I’m not a sword swallower. [Then, looking at the sky:] Hey, this must be where God lives!
Music: Devendra Banhart :: Sea Horse