I wonder if Miss Manners has an entry on this

I just got a short email from a reader of the UN-Internet-takeover article. I tapped out a reply, only to get this message back:

I apologize for this automatic reply to your email.

To control spam, I now allow incoming messages only from senders I
have approved beforehand.

If you would like to be added to my list of approved senders, please
fill out the short request form (see link below). Once I approve you,
I will receive your original message in my inbox. You do not need to
resend your message. I apologize for this one-time inconvenience.

Click the link below to fill out the request:

https://webmail.pas.earthlink.net/wam/addme?a=(rest snipped)

If someone sends me email expecting a reply, they ought to add my address to that “approved” list. Any non-brain-dead email software would do that automatically. It looks like the writer used a feature provided by the mega-ISP Earthlink, a company that really should know better. (As an aside to my correspondent, my apologies if your ISP forced this on you.)

I don’t plan to click – it just encourages this sort of thing.

11:05 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/email

Oh, so that’s why no one replied to my email

While wondering idly why no-one had replied to my emails for a while, I checked the status of the spool and received some delightful news:

jdb@bigbox:~$ mailq
2005-03-22 16:28:01  563 bytes
2005-03-22 18:06:25  837 bytes
2005-03-22 18:07:12  25462 bytes
2005-03-22 23:09:25  1144 bytes
2005-03-22 23:28:17  2990 bytes
2005-03-23 00:28:01  563 bytes
2005-03-23 04:07:01  562 bytes
2005-03-23 04:07:10  1068 bytes
2005-03-23 04:07:10  1206 bytes
2005-03-23 04:22:01  2054 bytes
2005-03-23 06:38:54  18937 bytes
2005-03-23 08:28:01  563 bytes
2005-03-23 10:38:16  2898 bytes
2005-03-23 10:42:10  2547 bytes
2005-03-23 10:43:40  2010 bytes
2005-03-23 10:44:26  1038 bytes
2005-03-23 11:22:40  523 bytes
2005-03-23 13:27:31  1401 bytes
2005-03-23 14:56:11  982 bytes
2005-03-23 16:14:35  3904 bytes
2005-03-23 16:28:01  561 bytes
2005-03-23 16:37:41  943 bytes
2005-03-23 19:35:21  494 bytes
2005-03-23 21:04:18  6257 bytes

Mail had been backing up for the past 24 hours and I hadn’t even noticed it. It wouldn’t be the first time this had happened – frequent wedging was one reason why I switched from exim to nullmailer, on the principle that a simpler mta would be a more reliable MTA (that, and Harvard firewalls port 25, so there was no point in running a real SMTP server anyway).

Restarting nullmailer cleared the queue, but left me wondering how to notify myself next time this happened. I couldn’t use email, for obvious reasons. I considered having a sound play through the speakers if the queue seemed wedged, but that would only work when I was at home.

I settled on a cron job to periodically dump the output from mailq to a file. My RSS reader, feedonfeeds, now prepends this file’s contents in giant honking red letters to my RSS display — procrastination via RSS now has a purpose!

While writing this, it occured to me that another solution would be to alias mutt to a script that alerted me if the queue was non-empty before running mutt:

#!/bin/sh

# warns user if WATCH's output is nonempty before running mutt

MUTT=/usr/bin/mutt
WATCH=/usr/bin/mailq
TMP=`/bin/tempfile`

$WATCH > $TMP

if [[ -s $TMP ]] ; then
    less $TMP ;
fi

rm $TMP

$MUTT

21:25 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/email

Microsoft MUAs: PGP breakage and support for Disposition-Notification-To: headers

Access to a personal Win2K machine has afforded me the opportunity to see firsthand all of the horrible things that happen to my email when it leaves the warm embrace of Emacs/Gnus on my PC. I discovered, for instance, that Outlook Express 6 (but not Outlook proper, interestingly) not only fails to display digitally-signed messages properly (both signature and content show up as attachments to a blank message), but OE does the user the kind service of flagging both as potentially harmful code.

I am unable to wrap my brain around how the Microsoft engineers came up with that one. The authors of the Jargon File have made a convincing attempt to show that it wasn’t (as I’ve read) an attempt by Microsoft to convince their users that email formatted with free software is corrupt and virus-ridden.

Hanlon’s Razor prov.

A corollary of Finagle’s Law, similar to Occam’s Razor, that reads “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

It would be generous to think that the MS engineers simply didn’t read the relevant RFCs. But how on earth is it possible that they could get the feature right in Outlook (the PGP-signed message’s mail-envelope icon even has a tiny seal-of-validity on it), yet manage to break it in Outlook Lite?

Perhaps the breakage was intentional, but the Real Customers who actually buy Outlook wouldn’t stand for it, so they fixed it in Outlook Proper and left it broken in Plebeian Outlook. (How’s that for paranoid raving!).

I’ve digressed. The point of this post was to explain that Netscape Messenger 4.7, iPlanet Messaging Server, Outlook, and Outlook Express all, depending on configuration, ask users if they wish to send a message as requested in a “Disposition-Notification-To:” header. Netscape has it switched on (except for Bcc:’d mail, like mailing list messages) by default.

Adding the DNT header in Gnus is a simple matter of pushing C-c M-n. Interestingly enough, Gnus doesn’t look for the DNT header on incoming messages, so it won’t issue receipts for email it receives: it only sends requests for receipts. (I suppose I could code that feature myself. Perhaps this summer.)

11:03 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/email