A client called today because their email wasn't arriving at the receipants inbox but bouncing back with a 'poor MTA rating' error.

Checked about every blacklist I know and our server was definitely not blacklisted. Must be the receipants host which for some reason was blacklisting his specific email address.

Told the client that it wasn't a problem on our side and that he had to request a whitelist himself (we'd do it but it wasn't a specific server problem so we're not going to spend time on that).

Fair enough, he'd do that.

Calls back. "Well, the other party says that your server definitely has a poor rating, it's on your side!!"

Alright, this is getting annoying. Gave him a few blacklist checking sites links and told him to run his domain AND our server IP through it. Indeed came back completely clean.

"But the other party said it's poor rating on your side so I'd think tha........"

YEAH WHY DON'T YOU SHOVE THAT OTHER PARTY UP YOUR FUCKING ASS. I'VE SHOWN YOU PROOF THAT IT'S DEFINITELY NOT ON OUR FUCKING SIDE, EXPLAINED IT TO YOU AND SO ON. MAYBE, FOR ONE FUCKING SECOND, TAKE INTO CONSIDERATION THAT THE OTHER PARTY IS FUCKING LYING?!?!?

FUCK OFF.

Fuck Microsoft.

No, not in any relation to windows this time.

Dear Microsoft, why on earth did you put us on your spam blacklist? There haven't been any spam attacks from our side, our servers have nearly the highest 'reputation' that email servers can get, we comply to all security standards and yet you're blacklisting us.

If for some reason you think something is wrong at our side anyways, we've tried to contact you and we either get ignored or get a very late response saying that we'll get delisted again within a day/week or whatsoever.

Microsoft, please go fuck yourself.

My current project at work: purchase verification, aka anti-fraud.

It's been two weeks, and my boss is flipping out because it isn't done. A robust anti-fraud solution. in two weeks. And he thought one week was a little much.

like, fucking really?

There are companies whose entire service is helping combat fraud. and he wants this done in a bloody week?

What makes me laugh through my tears of frustration is that the company that moved into the previous office? Yep, anti-fraud. Their entire business model is providing anti-fraud services to other businesses. They even tried selling him on it when they moved in. Bossman sales guy turned it around and sold my freaking desk out from under me instead.

But like. They're a small company: they had 9 people when they moved in, and were looking to add three more, so a total of 12 people. (I totally considered jumping ship, but their stack was too different.)

So. Bossman wants me to replace 9-12 people and their entire business in a fucking week. Yeah.

"Oh, but it's just sms verification" says he. What he also wants is the ability to flag users as fraudulent, have sticky verifications so they can't bypass them by backing out, have email checks as well as sms, have deferred verification to allow collecting required info (e.g. phone number), verification fallback, lockouts, manual admin whitelisting, admin blacklisting, and different rules per merchant and rule groups for affiliates to apply to all of their merchants, and of course the ability to customize those merchant/affiliate anti-fraud rules. But he shortens this gigantic list to "I want sms verification," despite actually asking for all of the above. I don't want to know about the mental gymnastics and/or blindfolding required to equate the two, but he's nuts.

Yeah.
All of that.
In a goddamn week.

And I get chewed out when it isn't done? Fuck off.

Go build me a goddamn 5m ft^2 castle out of basalt and marble using only your toothbrush and a rusty garden trowel, and have it done in a week. No outsourcing.

talk about ridiculous.

This tiny project is awesome. Thanks to @JoshBent (who partly got it from another repo as well) for providing a basic DNS server with hardcoded blacklisting functionality and thanks to @PerfectAsshole for correcting my mysql syntax I was stuck on for way too long.

I've now got this fucker to read blacklisted words from a redis list into an array which checks every requested domain to see if it matches. If yes, it proxies it through to another DNS server and if not, it'll log the requested domain to a mysql database and prints is as blocked onto the terminal.

If the domain matches any host from a service known to be integrated within a mass surveillance network, it also prints this out to thy terminal.

It's working yay! Gonna keep working on it today.

This is what I call a quick fix.

If (searchTerm == "coronavirus") {
return null;
}

So I ve been clinically depressed for about 10 years now. Been really great at hiding it. My illness and loneliness was so severe that i made up imaginary friends and that got so severe i couldn't tell what s real and what s not. Then about 5 years ago, i met a girl. As the cliche goes, everything felt better. Sunshine and stuff. I opened up to her. Shared stuff. I started becoming normal. The pain became bearable and manageable. Turned to entrepreneurship. Had goals and stuff. Had 7 failed startups but kept on going. Raised investment for an 8th. It went better than anyother. Was going to become the next big thing bla bla. She became the reason i turned from being a loner weirdo to someone awesome. Anyway, as nothing tends to last, my best friend who had been through thick and thin in my work, quit last year in October. He messed up some work from big client nd we had a fight. He left. In the meantime i scored a big multinational company. I was gonna propose to my girlfriend in March this year. But instead she decided to leave for someone better who left her in 3 weeks lol. Anyways, we broke up. During that time, my second friend decided to fuck up my work with the big company so hard that they were about to blacklist my company. And then he left too. I had a small team. 4 5 people doing their best. By that time, i was the only one left. On 28th feb i had my breakup, on 1st march i was sitting 700 km away from home in an office trying to talk the company out of blacklisting us. It took me around 20 days to make that happen. All the while dealing with the obvious, my depression getting stronger than ever. My imaginations taking shape and fucking up my reality. The voices in my head getting stronget and stronger. 4 months now since she left. I dont think i miss her anymore. She tried coming back once but i didn't let her. In the 4 months, i m at my worst. I am getting government contracts now. But i have no desire to do anything. The pain is unbearable. So much that on its good days it sucks the life right out of me. So much that when it gets severe the urge to harm myself in any way goes of the charts. My best friend and i, we became friends again after my ex left. He s been helping me as much as he can. I have all the good oppurtunities and chances that any entrepreneur who has been busting his ass for 5 years straight would kill to have. But i cant do anything. I m the only one left on my team. I have to handle the business, dev, marketing etc etc ends on my own. I tried hiring and scaling up but i messed that up because of obvious reasons. And now my company has 2 months of runway left. And i know if i bust my ass i can make it to 8 months more and even raise a round a. But its really hard to do when either you re sleeping 20 hrs a day or you re sleeping 3 4 hrs because you re afraid of the nightmares. Or when even you ve had a good day, the pain becomes so much that you lay on the floor having a breakdown. Yeah, i m trying professional help. I m hoping it helps me. Because right now, i dont care about being happy. I just want my sanity. Something i m clinging to with every fiber of my being. Something that s burning out like a candle burning from both ends. I cant give up my work. I dont want to. That s all i have. That s all what i love doing and now i cant even do that. I just want this to end somehow. Either i get better and the pain and the void and silence and everything else goes away, or i do. I dont know what will happen first. And i dont care. I just want to be normal. But i guess that s too much to ask.

Well fuck you too Farnell 🖕

I wish to create a guild for software developers. Like in the old age, where certain masterwork developers work together in order to provide non-hacky solutions. The beauty of a guild is that it would allow proper apprenticeship, Blacklisting of toxic companies and directly help with wage negotiations. Too often I see proper professionals working overtime just because they are harassed and having "impostor syndrome" (I know the term is hated, but passes the idea much better). Also maybe that would eliminate technical debt...
But hey, this is just a vision... :')

WHAT. THE. FUCK.

Fucking UCEPROTECT blacklist, who the hell blacklists a whole fucking ASN when they detect even a large amount of spam coming from it? For all they know, it could be just a couple of IPs. But nooooo, instead of blacklisting IPs, they blacklist the whole ASN, so now, even some of our machines are on the list, without us ever doing anything. Just because the IP is from the DigitalOcean prefix. UGH.

Needed money for my company, not enough clients to support business on SaaS alone. Took on a 5k / month job building a platform that competes with my SaaS (more niche, less generic). Also sign up new client who that company's owner is part owner onto my current SaaS. Win / Win?

I do a lot of custom work to my platform to fulfill their needs, which is why I ran out of time for the 5k / mo project. I did these customization for free. Losing money to keep client, but also improving my system.

Work gets busy, I need to drop the 5k project. Client is upset I am working more on his other company (he is not majority owner). I return 1 month of funds to the owner and say I cannot continue.

Owner threatens to make other company that he is part owner stop working with my software if I do not complete project. Blacklisting...great. I agree to work with an overseas developer to do it and PM it for 3 months at least. Making nearly nothing from it (now 1k / month for PM), working nights to deal with India, losing sleep...

Other company suddenly folds due to conflict of egos with that SAME owner. Users drop from 16 to 1. I drop the project, no more strong arming me. Everything is a loss, all effort and money lost for nothing. Bad bet..however...

Owner becomes 100% owner of the other company, and of the software company. I transition him to PM his own project, he still uses my software because It doesn't, nor will it, ever do what the one he is building does. Also, partners from previous company break off and use my software again. New Client. #profit.

But holy hell was it stressful in the interim. People's business tactics are disgusting. Stay calm, play it neutral. Win. Sometimes you have to do what you don't want to do in order to succeed...at least for a little bit.

I was so scared that how he screwed his partners he would screw me over as well if I built one of the modules I have planned for my System, but haven't done yet.

If I did it for him first and then built my own (totally diff codebase) I really didn't want to run into any legal issues considering the schematics he has now are mine, but I didn't finish that part of the system for him. He is obivously highly competitive. Even though he wanted me to, and still does, want me to run his company for him.

Who knows, maybe in the future. To be CTO / COO of two SaaS CRM's in the same space may make sense. But I will never sell my software to him or partner with him. Too much drama. Avoid the drama. Be careful out there fellas.

If you are a creator, people will take advantage of you in every way imaginable. Read the fine print, read the people, document everything. Don't put yourself at risk.

nothing like building a lead generation site in the advertising sector and then running a test through the site with an addblocker turned on.

There are a few email addresses on my domain that I keep on receiving spam on, because I shared them on forums or whatever and crawlers picked it up.

I run Postfix for a mail server in a catch-all configuration. For whatever reason in this setup blacklisting email addresses doesn't work, and given Postfix' complexity I gave up after a few days. Instead I wrote a little bash script called "unspam" to log into the mail server, grep all the emails in the mail directory for those particular email addresses, and move whatever comes up to the .Junk directory.

On SSD it seems reasonably fast, and ZFS caching sure helps a lot too (although limited to 1GB memory max). It could've been a lot slower than it currently is. But I'm not exactly proud of myself for doing that. But hey it works!

GM sucks. (General Motors)
There HR sucks, can't call on booked time, for phone screening and wanted me after I applied for job 4 months ago. I still entertained them. But now, it has gone too far.
I am blacklisting GM for life. I will never ever work for them, unless they give me 1 Million per month

Can we PLEASE once and for all redesign email and texting to be whitelist only?

Seriously, blacklisting doesn't work. We still have assholes that just because they know a line of text or a phone number can harass you forever. It IS harassment and needs to stop. We can always have the option of throw away blacklist addresses, but lets make primary email and phone numbers whitelist only as a standard feature. The business of SPAM would be dead overnight.