The Perceptus Back Story

Today I got a call from someone whom I helped setup with Google Apps for domains.  Primarily, he’s using Google to handle his email – it’s pretty much the exact same system that powers GMail, but under your own domain name.  We use it too for perceptus.ca email.  It’s awesome.  You can use the excellent webmail interface,  and IMAP for full desktop and mobile email applications.  Plus,  it’s free if you don’t need very many user logins.

If you have a vanity domain for yourself, get Google to host your email.  You won’t find anything better, especially for $0.

Anyway, my client is in China, behind the world’s biggest firewall.  And he can’t access his email.  His web requests get  forwarded to weird places. Ironically, he sounded rather pleased, since he’s actually on vacation, but it did raise some good questions.

Does Google Apps for Domains email actually work in China?  I don’t know, it might be a weird forwarding bug.  I’m not there now, so I can’t experiment with it.  If someone reads this and can confirm success or failure with Google Apps for Domains, that would be excellent.  Unfortunately, this is some info that I can’t seem to find on the Internet.

I wonder if any of Perceptus’ websites are blocked in China?

I found a new use for our Web Tools by Perceptus website.  I was sending a bulk email to friends, family, clients, and co-workers about my team’s upcoming race in the Red Bull Soapbox Derby in Vancouver.

But the list of email addresses I selected in Outlook, my PIM, would not copy and paste into a new email in Thunderbird, my email client.*  Outlook separates recipients with semi-colons, Thunderbird… doesn’t.  It’s not immediately obvious to me what Thunderbird will accept as a separator in a single “to” line. It took several Google searches (or was it trial and error?) to figure out that Thunderbird will accept line breaks, i.e. “enter”.

Now all I needed to do was find quick way to convert the list which looks like this “<Leonard> me@perceptus.ca; <Me too> me2@perceptus.ca” from Outlook.  In this case, the extra name information that comes up in angled braces was just in the way.

Fortunately, The Email Grep Text Wizard! from our tools site, tools.perceptus.ca, handled the job well.  Just paste the list from Outlook and let our website return a clean simple list of email addresses.  One email per line.

* My PDA syncs to Outlook so it has to be the personal info manager, but I prefer the email features of Thunderbird.  Yes, it’s cumbersome, and no, I’m not entirely happy with the setup, but I haven’t found anything better, yet.

Our VPS was running low on free memory the last few weeks.  After a bit of research, we realized that our email greylisting software, Milter-Greylist was using the most memory of everything installed on our server.  More than our database engine, web server, email server, and everything else (not combined)!

For those who don’t know, Grey Listing delays emails in an attempt to foil spammers which don’t typically follow standards for retrying email messages. Milter-greylist is a package that works with sendmail, our SMTP server. Milter-greylist is great, however, it keeps it’s working history in memory, which was OK for the two years that we have run it.  However, the amount of spam attempts continues to rise… why don’t home users notice that their computers have become SPAM zombies anyway?

So, the milter-greylist was storing tens of thousands of records in memory.  It had to be reduced.  Rather than switch to a database driven greylisting package, we decided to start blocking some SPAM attempts earlier in the process.

We enabled the outright blocking of inbound email attempts by any IP address listed on Spamhaus.org’s SBL+XBL list.  SBL+XBL are lists of computers (built by crazy wizardry) that one can use to blacklist email attempts.  I’m uncomfortable using blacklists like this, but, what can you do?  The odds of good mail being lost are very small, and hopefully, anyone who happens to get bounced unintentionally can phone us.

So, following the simple instructions here:

http://www.joeldare.com/papers/spamhaus.pdf

We were able to reduce the traffic to Milter-Greylist and it’s memory usage by 2/3 to 3/4!  Uptime and performance of our VPS and therefore everything hosted on it should be slightly better.

Spammers suck.