T-Online (German provider) enhances spam protection, and blocks legit listmail.

Just a quick pointer to an article in German for those 350+ Subscribers with a t-online-Mailaddress.

T-Online verbessert den Spamschutz - Legitime Mails werden abgelehnt.

Summary: T-Online now blocks non-spam Mail from Debians Listserver.

Syndicated 2008-03-31 18:35:45 from Sprachrohr - offizielles Verlautbarungsorgan

Geocaching with the n810

Today i tried the first time to do GeoCaching with my Nokia N810 running the Maemo (which is a Debian-based Distribution). I already own a Garmin Geko 201 with which i found 100+ Caches, so this is my reference.

The GPS-Receiver of the N810 is better than the one in the Geko (at least since i use the fixed gpsd, which normally shouldn't do something on the performance, but in my case... it made me feel better), so fixes come faster, and more accurate than on the Geko. (from hearsay the SirfIII-Chip is even better)

I run Maemo Mapper on the N810, a free (as in speech) Software written to do things better than GpsDrive at least on the Nokia Internet Tablets.

I wrote some programs to be the glue between Geocaching-Websites and GPSdrive (which depends on MySQL) and i modifed those to put the information into SQLite, which is the Database used by Maemo Mapper.
If i pump all my waypoints in such a file (which are currently 94607) Maemo Mapper gets slow. so slow that Maemo Mapper becomes useless.

On the Garmin-GPS-Receiver, i can have only 500 Waypoints, but i have a 'goto'-function, so i store my destination coordinates and say 'Goto' and the thing provides me an arrow which points to my destination and shows the distance (it doesn't know about ways so it points the direction directly, but that is usually fine as GeoCachers often are so abroad that no one has maps about the area.).

In Maemo Mapper i couldn't find such a function. I can say 'Goto Coordinates' and then it centers the map to there, but there isn't a sign and no line or arrow which direction i have to turn to. This is a problem (or something for the wishlist.)

So from GeoCachers view (and those people who want to navigate for other reasons) free Navigation-Software for Linux is an area where more work is needed.

Syndicated 2008-03-30 15:08:30 from Sprachrohr - offizielles Verlautbarungsorgan

being busy / Request for Help

Because of some modifications at my Real Life Orkplace, I decided to reduce other duties to get a better chance to deal with my new duties. So i requested help for my four packages in the Distribution

RFH: jove

My first package. A small, but powerful Emacs-relative, with all those uneeded things stripped which makes emacs fat. Maybe these days especially useful for small memory devices, as it gives you emacs-likeness for the price of nvi or ae. I have no idea how well it works in a real utf-8-environment.

RFH: milter-greylist

A greylist-milter which makes running a mailserver somehow possible for me. it keeps away about 2/3 of spam, which leaves me with only 400spams/day. I already have two contacts who want to help with that.

RFH: nn

No news is good news, but nn is better. This is a USENET reader, for those people who grow up with Webforums and Blogs: This could be still the most effective way to celebrate flamefests, gather information or communicate with people sharing same interests. And nn has in my opinion the best UI for it, and makes it easy and fast to find interesting articles and skip others. Well, Upstream Development has ceased to exist around 1994. I think if no one takes over, this package will become finally useless when IPv6 gets widely used (right after the release of 'Duke Nukem Forever') and it also doesn't deal well with non iso-8859-1-charsets. So best for this package would be to rewrite it from scratch (my dream: message/mime-handling/threading from mutt, scoring from slrn, and UI from nn) because the User Interface is much better than those of all still alive Newsreaders i tried.

RFA: synergy

This is my most popular package, which makes it possible to share one mouse and keyboard over many computers and displays. (It is available for UNIX/Linux, Windows and MacOS) This is a very very useful software, and i use it permanently. Sadly the Upstream Development mostly ceased to exist, and so i put this to ITA (instead of ITH) because many Debian-Users use it according to popcon. This software should be taken over by someone who is able to help Upstream. There is a RC-Bug, which caused the package be pulled from testing.

Interesting is that while filing those ITH/ITA all the same day, i only got responses for the packages which scores lowest in popcon, (24 for milter-greylist, 1196 for synergy).

Syndicated 2008-03-14 11:08:02 from Sprachrohr - offizielles Verlautbarungsorgan

Today i kicked 560 Mailaddresses off lists.debian.org ...

... because they are bouncing.

In my ongoing attempt to investigate and fix problems of our mailinglist-server, i found that we only had a working bounce-detection for lists starting debian-* minus debian-private and the three digest-lists.

So i rewrote some parts of the bounce detection:

We now have four categories of lists:

• high (30 or more mails a day)
• medium (20 or more mails a week)
• low (10 or more mails a month)
• very-low (the rest)

for these four categories we calculate a spam-rate depending on the number of distributed messages and the number of bounces in the timerange of 24 hours for 'high' lists, 7 days for 'medium' lists, 30 days for 'low' lists and 90 days for 'very-low' lists.

If the Spamrate exceeds 80% for unmoderated, and 60% for moderated lists, and bounces have been seen for more than 24 hours we kick. (these rates are subject to change, when we have implemented the warning mechanism)

So these changes implemented a bounce-detection for debian-changes-digest and today we reached the level of 60% bounces for more than 500 subscribers.

So what next?

To finish the bounce-detection, i want to implement something which tries to notify subscribers about bouncing mails. This is useless for 'hard'-bouncers, but people with some smaller problems like mail2news-gatewayers this could be helpful. I also want to implement something which sends out unsubscription notices for three weeks after the kick, so kicked out people can resubscribe after they have sorted out the problems.

Both should fire once a week per address.

What do you think?

Syndicated 2008-01-25 23:11:37 from Sprachrohr - offizielles Verlautbarungsorgan