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INTERACTIVE AGENCY
Archives Jun 2007
siteground’s braindead spam-filtering
We have a customer of ours who pays us both for e-mail/web hosting as well as our anti-spam/anti-virus relay service, Swirbo. Swirbo is a service that filters mail by having mail for a domain sent to it first, via MX records, and then relayed to its final destination.
Recently, this customer began reporting that she was unable to receive e-mail from certain people. Some investigation yielded this information from Swirbo, while attempting to deliver a legit e-mail message from someone on aol.com:
Jun 14 10:50:10 mta1 postfix/smtp[5285]: 90D0D834038: to=
, relay=redacteddomain.com[1.2.3.4], delay=3, status=bounced (host redacteddomain.com[1.2.3.4] said: 550 SITEGROUND Faked AOL, so you must be spam. (in reply to RCPT TO command))
Comcast is Not a Business ISP
Recently we had one of our regular (every couple of months) Comcast Nightmares. These happen now and again, and by now our entire company is fairly used to the “Comcast is down — go work from home or a coffee shop” routine. This time, however, I wanted to detail a bit of what we experienced, and talk about what it means for us. First, a rough timeline of our original problems:
Google and Greylisting
We’d have a recent spat of complaints from our Swirbo customers regarding their inability to receive mail from certain Google apps — i.e. if you invite someone to view a blog, or docs.google.com document. Today I got an example of the actual error they are getting:
Technical details of permanent failure:
TEMP_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 13): 450: Recipient
address rejected: Greylisted for 5 minutes
Anyone see a problem? The error we returned was 450, yet Google seems to think it was a permanent failure. Here’s a bit from the SMTP RFC (2821):
Online Communities
I’m currently working on a great new online community for one of our clients. During my research for this website, I came across an amazing presentation given at the Future of Web Apps 2007 Conference by Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency. In her presentation, Fostering Online Communities, Ms. Hunt outlines the basis for creating great online communities. She defines the various levels of online interaction, outlines the many aspects of effective social interaction on the web, explains the need for online communities, and much more. To listen to the presentation and to download the slideshow, go to futureofwebapps.com and look for the T. Hunt presentation on the front page.
