Category: Hosting

Birdhouse Hosting is happy to welcome a pair of sites belonging to a regular Birdhouse reader:

Simple Dreams Dolls: “Fine Fashions and Better Casual Wear by commission for your Asian Ball-Jointed Dolls. Also a doll gallery.”

Litterbox.com: “Personal web pages of two people and their cats. Twelve years of personal stuff plus anime cel galleries.”

ISPs are clamping down on port 25, preventing users from using 3rd-party SMTP servers such as Birdhouse’s, even with authentication. Some have even gone as far as requiring outbound mail to belong to a domain the ISP knows it controls. All a well-intentioned — but naive — attempt to thwart spammers.

Unfortunately, the trend makes it difficult for Birdhouse to offer SMTP services to a lot of customers. At this point, I simply recommend up front that people use their ISP’s SMTP for outgoing mail.

Now add to this the hassle of using a laptop and traveling from place to place — I hear from some customers who are changing their SMTP servers several times a day. And I hate recommending webmail because I myself hate webmail with a passion.

Solution: Birdhouse needs to open an alternate SMTP port, which people could use from anywhere. cPanel makes this easy to do, but the question is, which port to use for the SMTP alternate? In the first few hours of experimentation, have already discovered that SBC/Yahoo! also blocks port 26, which is the cPanel recommendation. In fact, some ISPs may be preventing their customers from using all non-standard ports.

mneptok helped to clarify the question: Need to choose a port that’s common enough to not be considered non-standard, but that we also don’t need for anything else. If you’re using one of the big commercial providers for connectivity and have found surprising ports blocked, let me know!

I remember in the early-mid-90s, it was still possible to find wide-open public mail relays, and it wasn’t even considered a problem. Now it’s hard even to use closed private relays. Doing business in a world full of bad guys is a drag.

Experimenting with RBLs in the mail server to catch messages originating from known spammy SMTP servers before they hit the SpamAssassin engine. Highly effective, but some of the RBLs cast too wide a net. For example, hapless users on major networks like Comcast may be assigned an IP recently used by a spammer (or by a virus-infected Windows computer), and end up on an RBL. Result: Legit mail inbound to Birdhouse customers gets bounced to confused but legitimate senders.

Had three such incidents with bl.spamcop.net in the past month, so have just dropped it permanently from the RBL list. In its place, added an RBL in China and another in Korea. These seemed to work well, but today I heard from a customer who was running a legit PHP mail script, which suddenly started timing out. Removed the new RBLs and the problem went away. Lesson: the RBLs being consulted must not only be accurate, they must be fast.

Aside from a few false positives, the RBL experiment has been very successful — server load down, straggler spam down. But getting it right is like tuning a fork.

Birdhouse Hosting is proud to welcome michaelpollan.com, the website of environmental journalist and J-School professor Michael Pollan. “A contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, Pollan is the recipient of numerous journalistic awards, including the James Beard Award for best magazine series in 2003 and the Reuters-I.U.C.N. 2000 Global Award for Environmental Journalism.” Site neatly designed by Birdhouse affiliate designer Leena Pendharkar.

Birdhouse Hosting is happy to welcome a pair of high-consciousness newcomers:

punnaji.com, a web site dedicated to distributing the teachings of Sri Lankan meditation master Bhante Punnaji.

weiquan-aid.org, “a web site representing the Small Grant Project For Rights Defense Assistance, a project of the Princeton China Initiative-Monica Fund” (site is written primarily in Chinese).

It’s interesting to see how differently people using Birdhouse Hosting services. Some set up a domain and do nothing with it for months (or ever). Others are heavy-hitters, consuming massive amounts of bandwidth and CPU. Some set up great sites with no interest in using email services, while others register domains for the sole purpose of email, with no interest in running a site.

Another interesting distinction: While most users handle email through a desktop mail client (some, like me, almost obsessive, always in search of the perfect mail app) and view webmail as an inconvenience one is forced to use when on the road or at an alien machine, I’ve come to accept that increasing numbers of people aren’t even aware that desktop mail clients exist. A lot of people — especially students, who float from machine to machine — live in webmail. Just explaining to some users that there is life beyond webmail can be tricky.

robertaklugman.com has been an email-only user for more than two years. Klugman was actually Birdhouse’s very first customer, and has been a heavy email user with no site to represent her food and wine marketing/promotion business. Today we set up something simple; more to come.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes josephhall.org, the all-purpose site of Berkeley SIMS PhD student Joseph Hall. Joseph’s got an interesting B2 Evolution weblog running at Not Quite a Blog, at which I found a reference to a neat trick: When using a Mac in bright sunlight, hit Cmd-Ctrl-Opt-8 for instant super-high contrast inverted display – a shortcut to one of the accessibility features, sans rummaging around in the prefs.

A few customers have asked whether I had Birdhouse Hosting badges they could put on their web sites, and I’ve finally gotten around to creating a few.

Two additional mutations of this specimen in the badge FAQ.

Thanks to customer Joseph Hall for kicking my booty to get this done.