Ouch

I read the following in a forum about a new product:

Calling something "advance release" instead of "beta" isn't the greatest way of garnering a loyal customer base. Especially in light of an absence of tech support...

Wow, almost seems like this company tried to rush something to market just to appease users.

Nice work Google and Microsoft

My wife sent me email (yes she sends me email even though she is in the next room) asking for help with a rejected message. She was trying to send to a hotmail.com address; since my domain is hosted on Google for domains, the rejection message was from the gmail postmaster. The error message was:

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: Gmail tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient
domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about
the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 550 550 SC-004
Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons. A block has been placed
against your IP address because we have received complaints concerning mail coming
from that IP address. If you are not an email/network admin please contact your
E-mail/Internet Service Provider for help. Email/network admins, we recommend
enrolling in our Junk E-Mail Reporting Program (JMRP), a free program intended
to help senders remove unwanted recipients from their e-mail list:
http://postmaster.live.com (state 13).

So basically this means that Hotmail is rejecting all email from Gmail. Wow! This is going to be a huge mess. After a bit of searching, I found that my wife wasn't the only person having problems. In the comments of a year old post, I found 2 references to this issue.

I hope that Microsoft and Google can work out their differences quickly as both are major email providers and the rejecting of email is going to confuse a lot of novice people and piss off even more.

The failure of catchall email addresses

For years when I ran my own server, I made up email addresses for each site I visited and had to enter an email address. They were in the form of somedomain.com@mydomain.com. I then entered an alias into sendmail to forward the mail to me, rebuilt the alias file and all worked well. When I switched to Google for Domains, I couldn't move over those aliases as I had several hundred and Google limited the number of aliases, so I opted to just use a catchall address. As more and more spammers forge return addresses, the amount of "returned mail" I receive has increased. Spammers use addresses like jorge_1975@mydomain.com and when other servers reject it, I get the bounces. Over the last week, I received almost 25,000 pieces of spam and returned mail.

What do I do? Google's filters aren't sophisticated enough to let me only accept mail from *.com@mydomain.com, so I setup another account on my Google for domains to catch all the mail. I'm now in the process of setting up filters to forward legitimate mail to my main account. This isn't ideal, but at the moment, it is the only way to keep all this garbage out of my main mailbox. What is interesting is that it appears that Gmail's spam learning is on a per-account basis (at least partly) as my new account has only had a few pieces of spam make it threw even though it is getting the same stuff my other account received.

Now if Gmail supported wildcards in filters, this problem would be much easier to solve.

I can't give up my catchall address as I've forgotten all the sites I've signed up for and don't want to potentially lose stuff (like my bank statement), so I guess I'll just have to live with this current solution.

Very cute, UPS

A few weeks ago, I opened our front door to check the mail and discovered a package under the door mat.

In case you're wondering, a 10 pound box doesn't fit under a door mat very well.