Explore Posterous

Speeding up Safari in Snow Leopard - My Solution

BBC NEWS | Technology | Internet addresses set for change

via news.bbc.co.uk

Sending email in the cloud

Having run a couple of startup companies in the cloud on Amazon Web Services, the issue of sending email has cropped up a number of times.

The problems

Amazon doesn't allow you to set reverse DNS lookup entries for your mail server and a large number of mail servers will not accept mail from a server that doesn't have this.  This is a spam prevention feature to try and cut down on mail being relayed through insecure mail servers.

The other blocking issue you will come across is blacklisting.  Because of the nature of cloud systems it is likely that someone else has had your IP address in the past.  If the person wasn't entirely honest then they will probably have been blacklisted at some point.  Here is an example error message you will receive if you try and mail from a blacklisted host:

553 Mail from xx.xxx.xxx.xxx not allowed - 5.7.1 [BL21] Connections not accepted from IP addresses on Spamhaus PBL; see http://postmaster.yahoo.com/550-bl21.html [550]

or

550 DY-001 Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons. We generally do not accept email from dynamic IP's as they are not typically used to deliver unauthenticated SMTP e-mail to an Internet mail server...

The solutions

So, what can you do about it?  The simple answer is do not send mail from the cloud, instead relay your mail through a server hosted somewhere else.

The first option is to send email through GMail.  This works fine for small volumes of email but as your web application becomes more succesful you will quickly start hitting the volume limits imposed by Google and will start seeing entries like this in your mail log:

550 5.4.5 Daily sending quota exceeded.

The best long-term solution is to run your own mail server hosted outside of the cloud.  I recommend slicehost as a provider, you can have a mail server up and running from as little as $20/month and this will allow you to send masses of email.  This might sound a bit ominous if you haven't set one up before but they have a great tutorial on setting up a mail server.

Dodging the spam folder

Once you have your mail server up and running you should set an SPF record for your domain.  SPF records are TXT DNS records that you create to announce that your new mail server is allowed to send mail for your domain.  Lets say you have just finished setting up your mail host as mail.example.com then you need to create a TXT entry for example.com with the following contents (including the quotes!):

"v=spf1 include:mail.example.com -all"

You should now be sending mail happily from the cloud and with a bit of luck your recipients will receive the mail in their inboxes.

Sweden loses its internet connection - Telegraph

Custom DNS Question / Problem for all of you web geeks and nerds

I have a domain.

*joerulesrecords.com*

I have two sub-domains and many email accounts for this domain, that I can't move or mess with. It's all hosted with the *Devil* (/Dreamhost/). I'm building a new website in *ASP*.

Now, Dreamhost is a PHP box. *Here lies my question.* If I just change the A record for the domain, will it affect the sub-domains as well? I don't want them affected at all because there is some very important stuff hosted there.

*Second question... *

If I setup a Custom DNS record for *new.joerulesrecords.com* and point it to my Windows box, when I go into Plesk or IIS on the Windows box, do I setup the domain like so:

*new.joerulesrecords.com* ?

I have set up the Custom DNS record and just waiting for propagation to take. Anyone have any suggestions / comments? Confused yet?

Neues vom Zensurprovider Vodafone

Einerseits macht sich der in der Blogosphäre durch Werbeschaltungen und entsprechende Zahlungen an Leute wie Sascha Lobo, Johnny Häusler, Stefan Niggemeier et. al. bekannte Telekommunikationsanbieter mit neuen Einfällen zur effektiven - und gesetzlich so nicht mal notwendigen - Sperrmassnahmen im Internet den Namen, den er bei seinen Werbepartnern nicht hat - und, kleine Ironie am rande, jusatment zu der Zeit, da man bei den deutschen Bloggern Werbung schaltete:

Weiterlesen an der Blogbar

Für F!XMBR gibt es auch eine selten dämliche App vom Zensurprovider Vodafone...

DotFuture

Heidelberg - The proposed launch of new generic top-level domains in 2010 is likely to cause an unprecedented shake-up to the domain name system and the Internet. It presents a significant challenge and considerable burden on rights owners who will need to reconsider their online strategies carefully. The issue of trademark protection has risen to the forefront and it has become clear that careful management of the launch is critical to avoid these new TLDs offering the opportunity of a fertile field for cybersquatting, phishing and other illegal and unacceptable behaviour.

What is the ICANN process that has led to this? How should brand owners react to this potential explosion...

Read article DotFuture on Pressehof

Google Apps SRV Records

Many of our customers try to user Google Apps for your domain with Olark. Unfortunately Google does not tell system administrators to configure Google Talk to work with external XMPP(Jabber) networks by default. This leads to a lot of problems when a customer has Google Apps for their domain, but does not have the required SRV records to work with Olark.

We’ve always pointed out customers to: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34143

But, this doesn’t always solve the problem, because sometimes it takes a while for ISPs to update their DNS cache, and it’s hard for our customers to double check their ISP, or their own attempts at setting SRV records. That is until now!

Introducing the Olark Google Apps for your domain SRV Checker. Using the below tool, you can now finally see if your SRV records are set correctly.

Olark Google Apps for your Domain SRV Checker

Why is a mortgage site Google? Hijjack or mistake?

via searchcowboys.com

Great Google gets a new copy!
This happens because the own of the domain "ghlplc.co.uk" has created an A records which resolves to the IP address from google.co.uk. The funny part is that the Googlebot has index google's pages on a third party domain ;)

DevCentral Wiki: DNS_decoding

via devcentral.f5.com