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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • I’ve experienced this with Merlin BirdID by CornellLabs. My suspicion is that they are using some sort of API to verify email existence but only against aboveentioned “big providers”. Of course that wouldn’t support any of my selfhosted email domains. On the other hand they didn’t verify my ownership of said email, therefore I’ve registered with birds@gmail.com, that I don’t control and I sincirelly apologize to whoever does… For my use the account has no value whatsoever anyway. Also, I’ve checked and my login information are gone from the app now, so maybe the’ve fixed it already?

    Anyway, I’d love to know what “valid and recognized” means. The only thing that you need for mail delivery is a valid MX record and a mailserver sitting on the end of that record. As an admin by trade, I suspect this is not malicious by design, it is just a lousy/lazy developer who trusts the statistically probable answers of his AI agent more than he should. ( Oh - it’s an AI app - that makes it almost certain 😇.)








  • This is really annoying for me 😇 . I am not one who would believe words of the Elon and I would say that intuitively it didn’t make financial sense but I’ve looked into it and to my surprise the numbers are actually getting kinda close:

    • they claim they have 4 million customers - at 100 USD per customer / month x 12 - 4.8 billion USD. There will be some tax, but they have also deals with US military (StarShield) or GSM Operator and wide range of “enterprise services” , so I suspect the income could be at around those 5 billion USD from starlink alone.
    • they did 90 launches last year maintaining and expanding the network. It’s hard to say how much a falcon 9 launch cost - but CNBC says it was sold for 67 million USD in 2022. Not sure how much margin Elon gets on a single launch, but 5 billion / 90 is over 55 million USD - which is right there in the area…

    Now this is ignoring the cost of the satellites, the maintenance of 150 ground stations, development of the HW /SW, advertising and god knows what else - but still at least in the “ballpark numbers”.

    To my unpleasant surprise - the Elon might not be joking on this one 🧐 - the Starlink might be one day paying for the development of the Starship - if it isn’t already 😲 Also - this is bloody cool 🤬


  • 2 points I’m not sure got mentioned here

    1. There is a new hero on the block - his name is mox and he is bloody awesome! It’s a single binary written in go, that takes care of (citing) …IMAP4, SMTP, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MTA-STS, DANE and DNSSEC, reputation-based and content-based junk filtering, Internationalization (IDNA), automatic TLS with ACME and Let’s Encrypt, account autoconfiguration, webmail… pretty much everything. As somebody who maintains few mailservers for living - this is a wet dream come true. It implements eg MTA-STS that I haven’t seen even on many commercial offerings yet. You run it once - it returns a long file with DNS records for MX, SPF, DMARC, DKIM etc… You run it second time with some switch - it generates its systemd file. Then you just spin it up - and that’s it. I always wanted to write something like this but I am nowhere near clever enough. There may be some performance constrains, it’s probably not “production grade” yet - but I’ve been using it for over a year with stellar results.

    2. There has been a lot of gatekeeping (they call it security strengthening) going on lately. In my experience even year ago If you managed to fit into your DKIM / DMARC / SPF rules stated in your DNS records you could still deliver pretty much everywhere. Even with a dynamic IP. As of June 2024 google started enforce PTR records and M$ I believe followed (meaning if your ip doesn’t have a correct PTR record your mail isn’t deliverable to Google / Microsoft mailservers). Most residential ISPs will not enable you to edit your PTR and since more and more people / companies use bloody google /M$ cloud services I don’t think it’s worth running mailserver just from home because the deliverability would be a hit and miss. You need at least to proxy the outgoing mail through some cheap VPS with public ip that you can set a PTR on.






  • I meant

    Depending how the Maldives is doing this (is it based on Israeli Citizenship or is it based on Israeli Nationality?)

    It’s in the article - passports!

    It doesn’t make any difference, since because there really aren’t any supporters of Israel in this thread, you will just open on anyone you assume is one with walls and walls of text (with which I mostly agree with you) but on a topic nobody put forward and in this condescending manner that is just meant to offend people. You haven’t tried to understand my argument at all, you haven’t even read the bloody article, you just want to scream at somebody.

    So since you are this terrible at reading - let me put it again just for you and you only, I’ll try to be blunt:

    The tragedy here is that Israel says in response to the 7/10 that all Gazans are guilty, they all deserve to die. That is not acceptable, that is called collective punishment. And Maledives are justifying Israels approach by doing the same. Now Israel can say:

    " Look ! Maledives are also using the same principle of collective punishment / collective responsibility and the World is praising them! “They are all antisemites and they are all using “special meter” on us and different meter on everyone else:”. /s

    …and what is worst - in this case they have a point! This exactly what we don’t need right now. They could have just banned the settlers, or they could have just banned those several settlers Biden has banned and that would be perfectly fine. This is clumsy at best - no - It’s just tragically stupid. It’s costing us time that Gazans don’t have.

    I would like to point out that for some time I’ve felt bad for also wrongly accusing somebody without reading it all ironically also in regard to the Gaza conflict, but you are so much worse than I am.