Archive for March 2008

MessageLabs versus GMail

March 31, 2008, 11:22 am

MessageLab mail forwarders have been unwilling to talk to GMail servers at least since Saturday 2008-03-29, with a mix of TCP “connection refused” and SMTP “421 Service Temporarily Unavailable”.

Perhaps it’s related to flurry of articles about GMail CAPTCHA cracking three weeks ago and the resulting surge of spam.

Whatever the reason, it’s a painful outage.

Followup, Tuesday 2008-04-01 7:48am EDT:

MessageLabs appears to be listening to GMail’s servers again. New messages are flowing. I haven’t seen the messages queued up during the outage, yet.

More detail on the Google CAPTCHA-cracking botnet.

Category: spam  |  Comment

blog backup online – out of beta

March 14, 2008, 6:47 am

I’ve been using the blogbackuponline beta since last April.

It just works.

Now it’s out of beta. I recommend it. (I’d recommend it even if Techrigy didn’t offer a small incentive to share the experience.)

Category: web  |  Comment