Business Trip To USA, Mailing Problems with Translator Plugin Pro etc.

I am going on a business trip to USA, tentatively on 24th of November. I will be around Carlsbad, California. The trip is for 10 days (including 3 days of travelling). I will be doing what I love to do most - envisioning and architecting next generation (read Web 3.0) web applications for my (S&P 500) client. I think it will be something worth remembering, if we can even get to do 10% of what we are envisioining.

I would be happy to meet anyone, time permitting, during this period. I will be accessible through angsuman[dot]chakraborty[at]gmail[dot]com.

While I am making sure that everything runs smooth during my absence, things may be a bit slow, despite my best efforts, so please bear with me during this time.

On a different note, we had a bit of emailing problems, while emailing Translator Plugin Pro. This is because we connect to the mail server from BSNL IP addresses. BSNL is our broadband provider. BSNL allocates only dynamic IP addresses which are sometimes abused by spammers. So email systems which rely on blackhole lists may erroneously mark our emails as spam. This is a serious problem with any blackhole lists which doesn’t protect dynamic IP addresses from being added to their lists. In our case we do not have any control over the IP address which is assigned to us. We use it to send a product which is asked and paid for by our customers and yet RBL based aggresive email filters simply mark them as spam!

Blocking dynamic IP addresses is meaningless and serves only to block legitimate users. Spammers simply change their IP addresses each time and move on to greener pastures. RBL based filters must provide an alternative means of validating the authenticity of email senders and not merely rely upon IP addresses. One of our customers mentioned about Sender Policy Framework. I am looking into it and will implement it after I am back from US. The key issue is that I am not a Postfix guru, not by a long shot. If only I could get someone at a reasonable price to configure my postfix, dovecot & named for me..sigh..

I have moved the generation process to our server, which has all good and dedicated IP’s. So hopefully we have solved the email problem for now. And yet so much remains to do. At times such as these I wish I had few clones to help me.