Email on Evan Hoffman

Amazon SES - "Illegal Header" errors

Mon, 16 May 2011 12:37:49 +0000

My thoughts on the “illegal header” error some people are encountering when relaying mail through postfix/SES. Plus some perl code that should help fix it.

Integrating Amazon Simple Email Service with postfix for SMTP smarthost relaying.

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 12:23:47 +0000

How I configured an EC2 instance to relay mail through Amazon’s SES, and some of the bumps I encountered along the way.

Autodiscover mysteriously stopped working (Exchange 2010)

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 12:30:30 +0000

I had Autodiscover working for months but recently it just stopped. I’m not sure why, but it may be related to removing the last Exchange 2003 servers from service recently. Maybe some setting got wiped from AD when I uninstalled Exchange 2003 (as per the procedure Microsoft gives). Basically what was happening was that the email address field was being autopopulated by the user’s UPN rather than their email address. Since we have a single label domain, the UPN isn’t a valid email address, and autodiscovery fails.

Relaying through Google Apps using Sendmail to bypass EC2 spam blockage

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 14:48:06 +0000

Update 3 May 2011: I’ve subsequently modified our EC2 systems to relay SMTP mail through Amazon’s SES which doesn’t have the 500 messages per day limit that Google Apps does.

A few months ago I moved a site into EC2. I didn’t want to move the existing IMAP server (ugh) so I moved the email to Google Apps. There are only about 10 mailboxes so we went with “Standard” edition (free). Once we completed the move to EC2 we discovered that emails from our webserver were bouncing due to our EC2 IP address being listed in a spam RBL. This sucked, so I looked into relaying the mail from the EC2 webserver through our Google Apps account. Fortunately this turned out to be pretty easy.

Wasted time with Exchange 2010, SquirrelMail, and IMAP-SSL

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 17:32:11 +0000

I’m setting up SquirrelMail to point to my Exchange 2010 server via IMAP (don’t ask) and couldn’t get SM to talk to Exchange on port 993 (imaps). Even though the servers on the same subnet, any time passwords are being sent over the network I like to opt for SSL. I found a couple of sites suggesting that the problem was that there was no SSL certificate installed, but I knew for a fact there was a valid certificate because I could get to https://webmail.example.com/ for OWA.

The Barracuda Spam Firewall VMware Appliance (Vx) finally exists!

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 18:24:12 +0000

When I started at my current company, spam was handled with a separate server running SpamAssassin and a few other services. This sort of got the job done but required babysitting. I wasn’t part of the Sysadmin team at that point but I know they had to restart SpamAssassin relatively frequently, manually clear out the email queue when people noticed they weren’t receiving email, etc.

After a few months, someone wised up and purchased a Barracuda Spam Firewall. I assumed this was basically a pretty GUI wrapper around the same tools we had already been using, but it was certainly worth the money. In addition to the basic filtering of spam it filtered for viruses, performed recipient verification against AD via LDAP, had nice graphing and reporting.

Long email signatures amuse me.

Sun, 12 Sep 2010 11:50:13 +0000

Putting a glossary in your emails is a new one for me. Not really a bad idea if you deal with lots of industry-specific terminology and lots of non-industry people.

From: Clickatell SC [noreply@clickatell.com] Sent: Sunday, September 12, 2010 1:04 AM To: Evan D. Hoffman Subject: Clickatell System Alert

Dear Clickatell Client,

(Blah Blah Blah)

Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Email: support@clickatell.com

Phone: +27 21 910 7700 (South Africa) +1 650 641 0011 (US) +44 20 7060 0212 (UK) +61 290 371 951 (Australia)

Outlook 2007 & Exchange 2010 Autodiscover SSL certificate error annoyance

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:51:54 +0000

One of the more annoying side effects of migrating my mailbox to Exchange 2010 has been the nagging of Outlook 2007’s Autodiscovery feature. Now, every time I start Outlook I get hit with a certificate error for autodiscover.domain.com. Now, autodiscover.domain.com is a CNAME to mail.domain.com, which is the OWA URL for the CAS. The SSL certificate is valid - but it’s valid for mail.domain.com. I could buy a SSL certificate from GoDaddy for $12.99 (an insanely great price, btw) for “autodiscover” but that would also require using another IP address on the CAS (since you can can only bind one SSL certificate to an IP:port pair), and that seems like a waste of an IP address.

Moved my email directly to Google

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:36:16 +0000

For a few years I’ve been funneling my various inboxes directly to my Gmail account. The massive storage, great web UI, and spam filtering made it a no-brainer. I’d basically been relying on a .forward file to do this until a couple of days ago when I signed up with Google Apps for evanhoffman.com, changed the MX records to point to Google, and … all my email still forwards to my Gmail account. But at least Bluehost is out of the loop now. Really, at this point the only reason for me to stay with them is the massive storage quota I have with them for the gallery; but even that doesn’t make much sense with the Picasa web albums stuff. They own Blogger so I assume I could port this whole thing over. Google’s free so I guess I’d save like $100 per year moving everything there, and I mostly only use it for email anyway. I think I’m paying like $8/month… With thin-provisioned disk space they could drop that to like $3/month probably and still make $.