The Language of Anarchy


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    I tried to update some of my Hotmail mail-filtering rules. Guess how well it worked? (Hint: I'm posting here).

     

     Aparently Microsoft hasn't figured out how to get their site working in "English" yet. And yes, it's set to Americenglish, not Canadian Eunglish.



  •  "Unfortunately, rules don't work with your language" sounds like something you'd read in stage two of a flamewar, about two steps before people start announcing that they're adding entries to their killfiles.



  • You're using Hotmail?!  Wow, now it's just you and my (elderly) dad left...

    BTW: Did you find this site with Altavista or Yahoo?



  • I have a Hotmail account too, though I use it as a throwaway email address because they seem to have the worst spam filter ever.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @mott555 said:

    I have a Hotmail account too, though I use it as a throwaway email address because they seem to have the worst spam filter ever.

    Yup. I set the filter to "trash everything", then just whitelist any website that I actually mail from. It's my forum sign up and newsletter dumping bin. It has been for a very long time. I think I still get month notices from Jelly Belly, because I once, in 1996, signed up with them through one of those 'omg you can email for free stuff on the Webternets' lists that newspapers would print when they didn't have any real news.

    If I hold onto the account until next year, I'll have had it for more than half my life.

    Lawn.



  • I wrote off hotmail in the mid nineties, when EVERY FUCKING PIECE OF SPAM IN THE UNIVERSE came from their servers.



  • Wow you're old...



  • @mott555 said:

    I have a Hotmail account too, though I use it as a throwaway email address because they seem to have the worst spam filter ever.

    see: mailinator.com



  • @MascarponeRun said:

    @mott555 said:

    I have a Hotmail account too, though I use it as a throwaway email address because they seem to have the worst spam filter ever.

    see: mailinator.com
     

    So anybody can view any @mailinator.com mailbox on that site? Interesting.

     


  • :belt_onion:

    Yes, but you can mask the mailbox name (e.g. M8R-rmtci4@mailinator.com goes to bob@mailinator.com).



  • @mott555 said:

    @MascarponeRun said:

    @mott555 said:

    I have a Hotmail account too, though I use it as a throwaway email address because they seem to have the worst spam filter ever.

    see: mailinator.com
     

    So anybody can view any @mailinator.com mailbox on that site? Interesting.

     

    Yeah, properly throwaway. I find it works for somewhere around 90% of online sign-ups. The only problem is that if you forget your password, you quite often haven't a clue what email address you signed up with either.

    Talking of mailinator, can anyone explain to me in very general terms how they do what they do with their DNS? If you go to http://somename.mailinator.com it automatically redirects to mailinator.com/somename (or some such). This is outside my field, and my DNS experience extends to sometimes having to set up separate www. and mail. dns records. Does all .mailinator.com traffic simply get directed to the malinator.com server for it to handle?


  • :belt_onion:

    @MascarponeRun said:

    Talking of mailinator, can anyone explain to me in very general terms how they do what they do with their DNS? If you go to http://somename.mailinator.com it automatically redirects to mailinator.com/somename (or some such). This is outside my field, and my DNS experience extends to sometimes having to set up separate www. and mail. dns records. Does all .mailinator.com traffic simply get directed to the malinator.com server for it to handle?

    Yes. You can set up a wildcard A record (e.g. *.mailinator.com. 3600 A 66.135.37.96).



  • @hoodaticus said:

    I wrote off hotmail in the mid nineties, when EVERY FUCKING PIECE OF SPAM IN THE UNIVERSE came from their servers.
    For me it was when the spam started coming from Hotmail themselves. Not as in "originates from their servers" but as in "marked as a special message from Hotmail that can't be blocked, deleted, etc".



  • @MascarponeRun said:

    Talking of mailinator, can anyone explain to me in very general terms how they do what they do with their DNS? If you go to http://somename.mailinator.com it automatically redirects to mailinator.com/somename (or some such). This is outside my field, and my DNS experience extends to sometimes having to set up separate www. and mail. dns records. Does all .mailinator.com traffic simply get directed to the malinator.com server for it to handle?
     

    it's probably done with .htaccess mod_rewrite, not sure whether you can do full redirect into subfolder with DNS only, never seen it for sure.



  • @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    not sure whether you can do full redirect into subfolder with DNS only, never seen it for sure.

    Couldn't you just use a CNAME?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:
    not sure whether you can do full redirect into subfolder with DNS only, never seen it for sure.

    Couldn't you just use a CNAME?

    CNAME doesn't redirect, it simply allows you to add aliases to an A record (e.g. www CNAME @). The user agent remains completely unaware of it, remaining at the site entered.

    A wildcard DNS entry (which does exist for mailinator) plus rewriting based on the Host header is what you'd need, and appears to be exactly what they're doing.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    CNAME doesn't redirect, it simply allows you to add aliases to an A record (e.g. www CNAME @). The user agent remains completely unaware of it, remaining at the site entered.

    Yah, but your server could take a look at the URL then return a 302.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @Daniel Beardsmore said:
    CNAME doesn't redirect, it simply allows you to add aliases to an A record (e.g. www CNAME @). The user agent remains completely unaware of it, remaining at the site entered.

    Yah, but your server could take a look at the URL then return a 302.

    Sure, it would just mean all the extra effort of setting up your own name servers with either a ginormous zone file, or a database backend for selecting responses, and then a server configuration that also understands this huge number of virtual hosts.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    Sure, it would just mean all the extra effort of setting up your own name servers with either a ginormous zone file, or a database backend for selecting responses, and then a server configuration that also understands this huge number of virtual hosts.

    Or just telling Apache/IIS to serve the same file to every request. Which is probably what they're doing anyway, considering you can make-up new email addresses "on the fly". (Then putting your redirect logic inside of that file, in case you weren't connecting the dots there.)

    So they use their existing file, then add a quick 2-liner, if URL = "*.blah.com", response 302 "blah.com/*"



  • True, the web server part of it will be the same whether or not you want custom DNS. You could perform the redirects with mod_rewrite though, although they're not using Apache:

    Server: Jetty/5.1.4 (Linux/2.6.24-27-server amd64 java/1.6.0_11 [sic – there really is no trailing ")"]

    Yep. Java! (Definitely Enterprisey)


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