Furl Meta Tags

Furl allows you to archive webpages you visit. With Furl you can have all of your bookmarks online and available from whatever system you happen to be using at the moment wherever you may be as long as you can access the Internet from that system. When you bookmark webpages with Furl, Furl archives a copy of the webpage for you. Unless you mark bookmarks as private, you can share bookmarks with others, but only you can access the copy of a webpage that has been archived for you when you bookmarked the webpage.

When Furl bookmarks a page for you, you can have an area you have highlighted on the webpage added to a "clipping" field. You can add your own comments on the webpage to a "comment" field. You can pick a category or multiple categories for the webpage. You can create whatever categories you choose. The title for the webpage will also be stored with the bookmark for the page.

Furl will also look for "author" and "date" meta tags on the webpage. If you are creating webpages that others may Furl, you can have Furl automatically fill its "Author" and "Publication Date" fields by adding meta tags like the following to your webpages. The date should be in the form YYYY-MM-DD, i.e. year, month, day form with a leading zero added to one-digit months or days.

<META NAME="author" content="Jane Doe">
<META NAME="date" content="2006-04-02">

[/network/web/archiving/furl] permanent link

Why Was My Email Blocked

I use the following blocklists on my email server:

Blitzed Open Proxy Monitor List
Open Relay Database
Composite Blocking List
McFadden Associates E-Mail Blacklist
SORBS
Passive Spam Block List

I also download the jwSpamSpy Spam domain blacklist, which is available from http://www.joewein.de/sw/blacklist.htm once a week and update sendmail's /etc/mail/access file with it to block email from domains on that list.

Recently, I was notified by a couple of users that some of their email correspondents are reporting that email to the users is being rejected. I created a Perl script, find-recipients, to check sendmail maillog files for a specified sender's email address to determine if email from that sender was successfully delivered or rejected.

I found one BellSouth sender's email was being rejected because the IP address of a server handling his outgoing email, 205.152.59.72 [imf24aec.mail.bellsouth.net] is on the SORBS blocklist. I submitted a report on the matter to BellSouth by completing their support request form at http://services.bellsouth.net/footer/feedback.html, but I am not a BellSouth customer, so don't know whether my report will prompt them to address the matter. I also notified the sender of why the message was rejected and provided the URL for the support request form to him, but I would be surprised if the sender reported the problem to BellSouth, his email server provider.

I'm afraid most senders will conclude, if they can send email to most of their correspondents that the problem is not on their end, no matter what explanation I might provide about spam blocklists and why their email was rejected. It is difficult just to get a sender to provide the exact rejection message they get when their email is bounced. Most feel they only need say that email they have sent has bounced, ignoring the cause listed in the bounced messages they receive. And when users on my system pass on reports of email to them not getting through, they often don't even provide me with the email address of the sender or a date when the problem occurred making it virutally impossible to immediately isolate the cause of a particular message being bounced.

I found that email from another sender, whose email was coming from Network Solutions' email servers, was rejected four times on March 8, 2006 and once on March 17, because three Network Solutions email servers were on the SORBS blocklist and one server was on the Passive Spam Block List. Two email messages from him were accepted on March 8 and one on March 29, however.

March 8, 2006 Rejections

SORBS: 205.178.146.53 [omr3.networksolutionsemail.com]
PSBL: 205.178.146.50 [mail.networksolutionsemail.com]
SORBS: 205.178.146.55 [omr5.networksolutionsemail.com]
SORBS: 205.178.146.55 [omr5.networksolutionsemail.com]
SORBS: 205.178.146.55 [omr5.networksolutionsemail.com]

March 17, 2006 Rejections

SORBS: 205.178.146.52 [omr2.networksolutionsemail.com]

When I checked the PSBL list, I found the Network Solutions server had been detected as sending spam on March 6, but had been removed from that list on March 8, but apparently after the sender had sent his email on that date when one of his messages was rejected, because of the presence of the server's address on that list.

When I checked the SORBS blocklist, I found that all of the Network Solutions server addresses had been removed from that list also, so it appears his email service provider, Network Solutions, has already addressed the problem.

I added both senders to the list of those for whom no blocklist checks should be made by adding their email addresses to /etc/mail/access with lines like the following:

someone123a@bellsouth.net       OK
someone456b@example2.com        OK

I then rebuilt the access database with the command makemap hash /etc/mail/access </etc/mail/access

Note: In order to bypass blocklist checks for a sender by adding the sender's email address to /etc/mail/access, delay_checks has to have been specified in the sendmail configuration file, e.g. /etc/mail/sendmail.mc. This can be done by adding the line below to sendmail.mc and then rebuilding sendmail.cf from sendmail.mc.

FEATURE(delay_checks)dnl

You can regenerate the sendmail.cf file with the m4 command. You need to restart sendmail afterwards for the change to take effect.

m4 /etc/mail/sendmail.mc > /etc/mail/sendmail.cf
/etc/init.d/sendmail restart

[/network/email/spam] permanent link