It appears that some people have difficulty unsubscribing from mailing lists on my server. Perhaps this is because of the anti-spam measures I have on my server.

Fighting spam takes a ridiculous amount of my time. I employ several methods of preventing the delivery of spam to this list and to the mailboxes on my server. Among these are blacklisting and greylisting.

With blacklisting, I use several methods to obtain lists of known spammers and tarpit those hosts. (See OpenBSD’s
spamd(8) for more info) If you have having problems sending emails to this list, the list manager (to un/subscribe) or me, perhaps your server landed on a blacklist.

With greylisting, if my server hasn’t recently “talked” to your server, your server gets a temporary failure message. If your server retries in 30 minutes (the standard), your message will be accepted. Many large email providers use broken methods to deliver mail. They use a pool of SMTP servers that rotate on retries. Since greylisting uses the IP address of the sending server (along with the sender email address and the recipient email address) to determine when a message should be delayed or delivered and these pools use different IP addresses for each host, it is theoretically possible that the message NEVER gets delivered if the pool doesn’t retry with the same IP address within the timeout period. For large known providers, I make an effort to whitelist their pools, but not all providers make that information easily accessible. Usually the downside to greylisting is that your message takes ~30 minutes to be delivered. It sucks when I place an online food order and don’t get the confirmation email for ~30 minutes (and their system ate the order and we assumed it was on the way).

When all else fails

If you are trying to contact me and my server is simply not receiving your messages, leave a comment to a post on my site. Comments are moderated and I’m a clever guy and should be able to figure out that you don’t actually mean for that comment to be made public. But if you’re concerned that I may not understand, put in the comment that you tried to email me and it didn’t work, please don’t publish this comment, …

So where have I been?

Two months ago, I made the very difficult decision to leave my previous job and start working with a new company. I loved my old job and especially loved the people I worked with. But, I was working all the time. They were not in a position to hire help and I really couldn’t do it anymore.

And, I started writing for Undeadly: The OpenBSD Journal. As an editor for the site, I am more inclined to post my OpenBSD-related content on Undeadly instead of here. So check me out there.

Also, Holly and I are preparing to celebrate our tenth (YES, 10TH!) anniversary in a few days and are doing something special. I’ll post a recap or several posts recapping our celebration (with pictures!).

I put the time into setting up a mailing list for discussion SSH for just this purpose. Please use it. SSH question sent directly to me just get deleted.

The same applies to Yaifo since I set up a mailing list for Yaifo too.

Cygwin’s documentation is the official information you should follow for Cygwin SSH installation instructions.

See my explanation for removing the documentation from my site.

Join my ssh list for further SSH related discussion.

OpenBSD is a FREE/secure operating system that is based on Berkeley’s implementation of Unix. It’s not Linux, but it is like Linux in that it is based on Unix. It falls into the category of “*nix.” But, it is very different from Linux. Linux has become a very easy to install, somewhat easy to configure and use Unix-like operating system. It works with a vast array of hardware and software and has world-wide support. OpenBSD focuses on security and stability. If you are interested in using OpenBSD, read man pages, search Google and ask questions OpenBSD mailing lists.