[rescue] Corrupted list messages

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Thu, 30 Sep 2021, Mouse wrote:

> I'm dealing with mail at one of my jobs right now, where the internal
> SMTP server accepts mislabeled mail and delivers it internally without
> comment.

Seems like a useful diagnostic feature someone left turned on.

> I initially set myself up to fetch my mail from them and deliver it
> locally to me, but rapidly found they were handing out gross syntax
> errors.

Shades of Novell.

> Instead of fixing it, they wanted me to use some horrid bloatware to
> read my mail (to be fair, they provided the bloatware and the machine
> to run it on).

Still sounds like Novell!

> Indeed.  I've lost count of how many domains I've blocked because they
> don't support postmaster at .

I think Greg Woods used to run some sort of DNSBL on rfc-compliant.org
that folks could use to publicly shun sites that don't accept mail at
postmaster at .  I wound up on there accidentally due to a full disk once!

> I actually don't even bother trying these days, in general; if I get
> spam from a domain I don't recognize, I block it and forget it.

As much as I'd like to block mail from all companies in the "Big Tech"
cartel, too many people I actually need to correspond with have webmail
accounts on those services.

> I'm up to some 3100-3200 domains blocked, but it's finally mostly
> working; very little leaks through noawadays.)

I've mostly stopped blocking domains by name because of how much spam I
got from domains that were a day or two old.  A few DNS-based heuristics
send most of the annoyances away (fly-by-night operations often fail to
give a reasonable hostname in EHLO).

> I would rather be in a net.subculture populated by just a handful of
> geeks than accept the corporate "never mind standards, just use our
> bloatware and it'll all work".

We're going to end up with a parallel Internet if we want those days
back.  Far from a bad thing, it seems like part of the intent of the
original protocols--once you let everyone into something with such
"market potential," of course the suits and scammers are going to
entrench themselves.

> Indeed, to an extent I already am with my refusal to accept mail from
> spammers like Google.

I'd love to never receive mail from another Google, Microsoft, or Apple
domain ever again, but, again, there are just too many people I interact
with who were tempted by the free cheese in the trap.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke
Austin, TX
USA