Smalltalk with James Robertson

I swear, spam moves in waves, just like a marketing campaign. I was getting virtually no email with attached malware until about 2 weeks ago, when suddenly it turned into a flood. I hope it dies off soon; I'm getting tired of seeing it....

Here's a problem I didn't know existed - apparently, the various blacklisters have decided that domains residing in the EC2 IP range are spam (mail) pools, and have marked them accordingly. Reddit just ran into this problem:

We've also discovered that a lot of the verification emails we've been sending out haven't been going through. It seems that the mail server admins at some popular domains (e.g., comcast.net, rr.com, adelphia.net, and me.com) have their servers configured to consider all mail from reddit to be spam. This is because Trend Micro has marked Amazon's entire EC2 network as a "dial-up pool", and the aforementioned domains subscribe to Trend Micro's list and block all mail from anyone on said list. We've written to Trend Micro explaining that we're actually neither a spammer nor an individual end user, but rather an honest website that's kind of a big deal, and they sent us a form letter explaining how to configure Outlook Express and encouraging us to ask our ISP for further information. We'll try to figure something out as soon as time allows.

Note the truly useful form mail they got back, too :) I guess if you host on Amazon, you have to make arrangements to do something else for mail - maybe work with Google? This sort of blacklisting is a pretty broadbrush way to attack the problem, it seems to me...

Awhile back, I started seeing an endless stream of spammers joining the Smalltalkers group at Ning. I changed the group from "open" to "managed" - now requests come to me, and I just reject the obviously bozo ones.

How do I know the bozo ones? Well, they are all using gmail address of the form "name5641@gmail.com" Fortunately, the mass suspension option under the management tab is easy to use :)