The Wacky World of Chris Knight

SpamCop.net blocks @mac.com mail

I used to be a major fan of SpamCop. I think they have gotten sloppy these days. They have a method of finding spammers that involves seeding the net with honeypot addresses, and if your mail server sends that address email, of any sort, your server gets blocked. The problem is that some spammers are managing to figure out what these honeypot addresses are, and they use them in the From field on their spam. There starts the problem…

A while back my personal mail server became blocked by SpamCop. When I tracked down the reason, the only thing I could find was bounced spam. I had received spam through my secondary MX, so it bypassed my spam filters and user checks. When it hit my primary mail server, and was addressed to a non-existant user account, it was bounced. Because the From had been forged with a honeypot address, it bounced back to SpamCop. It would appear that SpamCop is not parsing the email sent to honeypot addresses to see whether they are real spam or bounce messages. This means that lots of legitimate mail servers will get blocked by SpamCop, and many administrators will have to disable SpamCop BlackHole services to receive legitimate mail. I’m sure this was the spammer’s intent, to poison the SpamCop well; and they are succeeding because SpamCop isn’t going the extra mile and parsing for bounces.

Today I realized that SpamCop was blocking email from Apple’s @mac.com mail servers. It looks like pretty much all of the @mac.com outgoing mail servers are blocked. Well, that doesn’t work for me. The well is poisoned, and I can’t risk so much as a sip. SpamCop is out of my RBL config.

The empty husk of Haus Boheme East Coast is now for sale…

Sunday was surreal for me. Beyond the normal surreal that is my every day existance that is… At an hour and a half before I had to be at the airport, Doug and I finished cleaning up the house. I took one last walk through those halls and I relived all the dreams I had when I bought it. Many of those dreams came true, and many were delayed or derailed by the choices I made between the day I bought the house and the day I showed up with my moving van three weeks later. The house has only been empty for me twice, the day that I signed the papers and this last Sunday. Sunday it was as free of baggage as the day I purchased it. At the end of 2000 I was surfing a cresting wave of Universal Potential, and as any surfer knows it doesn’t take much of a wiggle to land you face down in the swirling water. So much had happened since then, and so much of it centered on the house, that I associated much of the past five years with the house itself. Sunday changed that. I walked through the house and I felt all the potential again. I felt the wave of possibilities swelling within myself. It wasn’t the first time that I felt like the clock had been turned back for me. The last time the Universe allowed me to turn back the clock I jumped at the chance, thinking I could re-write history into something more ideal. This time I knew better. I accepted the shift in quantum possibilities, and the euphoric rush that accompanied it; and I chose to accept things just as they are. I leave all the potential contained in those empty halls for someone else to explore and enjoy.

I know that the Universe had some lessons for me; and turning back the clock just meant I had to go through it all again. So, I am cutting myself free of Tampa and the possibilities it once, but no longer, had for me. I am embracing the future, and all it holds. Hang on kids, it’s going to be a hell of a ride again!