Seen in #evolt:

Garrett spotted and spooled this fantastic CSS layout generator app. Not only is the code extremely high quality, it's amazingly well commented, detailing all the browser hacks it's using.

I'm putting money on me using it to build the replacement templates for this site...

http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/pie-maker/pagemaker_form.php

Having had previous success with the Great Wall of Spam and DSPAM, I was still a bit annoyed by the amount of spam making it to the DSPAM quarantine, and so to be periodically scanned and a small number of false positives permitted through.

I'd been hearing a bit about Greylisting, and Mike had had some good results with it, so thought I'd give it a go. A wee mail SNAFU last week was the trigger, and I installed qgreylist as a layer between IP blocking and DSPAM.

The way it works is like this: SMTP is designed to be tolerant of downtime of the recipient mailhost. So if a sending hosts discovers a problem, it'll wait a bit, then try again (and if it still has a problem, will wait for a longer time and try again - repeat for a few days until finally giving up). However, spam-sending software is designed for maximum volume throughput, not maximum %age reaching destination, both for not sweating the small stuff reasons, and because spam-senders tend to get blackholed within a few hours. So generally, it doesn't follow this part of the SMTP protocol.

So what happens when you deliberately cause a temporary problem to every piece of mail? Spam generally doesn't get repeated - it disappears before reaching your MTA. As long as you keep a track of mailservers that have tried to send you mail, and accept mail the second time around, real mail still gets through.

The results are impressive: my average 60-80 spams a day has been cut to around 10. Checking the DSPAM quarantine is no longer a nightmare if you leave it a few days. And as far as I know, no real mail has been lost.