Email Respite 17 years, 2 months ago by Martey Dodoo

Yesterday, I made a mistake while configuring Postfix, the program that deals with email on my server.^[1] The result of this was that I received no email over a 24 hour period stretching from approximately noon on Saturday to noon today.

I have misconfigured Postfix before, but have always realized my mistake within a much shorter period of time. The fact that I simply had not realized that I was not receiving any new email (I did wonder why a confirmation email from Foodler did not appear, but dismissed it as technical problems on their end) was somewhat humorous to me. Since the changes I had attempted to make would have rejected some of the email that is normally delivered to me, I had to consider the possibility that the broken Postfix was overzealous and all of the messages sent to me within the last 24 hours had disappeared into the ether.

This did not worry me as much as I thought it would. Maybe it is the time I have spent working with failing hard drives, but I have become almost completely inured to data loss. While it is possible that one of the messages I would have received would have been an unexpected missive from some long-lost confidant or former lover, it is just as likely that such a message was not sent. As a result, I do not think it is worth worrying about.

As I shrugged my shoulders and began composing a response to some friends to see if they had sent a reply to the very important email I sent yesterday afternoon, messages slowly began to trickle into my inbox. While this would mean I did not have to worry about lost email, I braced for a deluge of spam. It has not come.^[2]

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^[1] Technical note: For historical reasons that seemed like a good idea at the time, I have a catch-all set up. This means email sent to any address at marteydodoo.com (from "martey" to "xw3y9bpyo") will be received. Nowadays, people discourage setting up catch-alls because they can increase the amount of spam you receive. While I receive some spam targeted at randomized addresses like the one previously mentioned, a majority of my spam goes to two email addresses that were exposed to spambots. The changes that I wished to make to Postfix would reject all email sent to these 2 addresses and one related to TaxAct.com, which I used to prepare my taxes at some previous point, not realizing that they would sell my email address to unscrupulous marketers. This year, I will fill out my tax forms by hand.

^[2] I now seem to be receiving about 1 spam message an hour, instead of 20. Sweetness.