December 14, 2003
Pessimism and the American Landscape

Harsh criticism of American architecture. An extended screed on the loss of a sense of place.

Fantastic stuff.

Eyesore of The Month

Posted by jk at 06:59 AM
December 10, 2003
RCN. Really Clueless Network.

In the "My Email Kung Fu is ..." category:

Sometime in the last week, RCN.com / RCN.net changed their incoming email policy to require that the originating SMTP server's reverse DNS lookup matched the claimed-to-be name. Or at least that's what I've been able to infer.

Instead of bouncing messages with a worthwhile error message, the messages just get bounced back with:

----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<user-xyz@rcn.com>
(reason: 554 SMTP service not available)

----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to mx.mail.rcn.net.:
<<< 554 SMTP service not available
554 5.0.0 Service unavailable
Reporting-MTA: dns; gromit.kalucki.com
Received-From-MTA: DNS; carnegie
Arrival-Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 06:30:10 -0800
Final-Recipient: RFC822; user-xyz@rcn.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.5.0
Diagnostic-Code: SMTP; 554 SMTP service not available


And of course, RCN's technical support team is of no help. As far as I know, no other major mail system does this. After 3 years of running an anonymous mail server at home without a problem, I had to have my ISP change the reverse lookup for gromit to return gromit.kalucki.com instead of the old random.address.in.sanfrancisco.speakeasy.net.

Now, it seems, RCN is happy and is willing to take mail from me once again.

I'm sure that RCN's mailboxes are now 100% totally spam free now that this completely worthless and already circumvented "filter" has been put into place.

Bitter?
Me?
No.

Posted by jk at 05:43 PM