When I woke up this morning... No e-mail?

It had been disturbingly quiet in my inbox for a couple of days. I had seen less than a fistful of e-mails in my inbox for almost two days, plus a few commit messages for stratego-dev. This was a bad omen, I knew, but I rather spent my time working on my dissertation than taking much heed. Woe unto me.

As I woke up one morning (today, in fact), I noticed that there were absolutely no new e-mails in my inbox, not even a friendly spam message. Something fishy was definitely afoot.

I put on my detective had, and started deducing. My prime suspect: the .procmailrc file I edited a few days ago. It's not unheard of that I hose this file now and again when I think I'm in a hurry and decide that it's better to save early and safe often, even on live systems. Closer inspection and a few recollection exercises later told me that I had received e-mail just fine after the edit.

On to the next theory. I'm subscribed to a few open-source projects, among them Gentoo. Most, if not all of these e-mails are not sent directly to my university address, but rather through an ISP. I store a copy of these e-mails, in case of rainy day like this (quite uncharacteristically, it's sunny today, but you get my point).

I sshed inconspicuously over to the relay machine and checked my inbox there. As I suspected: full of goodies! At this point, I get the sinking feeling I usually experience when having to deal with the university mail system. While it's probably great at Fighting Spam and Furthering the Cause, it often becomes rather overzealous in its Quest. This case, it would later turn out, was no exception.

At this point in time, I thought it prudent to ask: What would Postel do? I never met the guy, so I didn't have the faintest inkling. That didn't stop me from at least trying something. I opened a new terminal window, then telneted over to rolf.uib.no and sent an e-mail to myself in the old fashioned way: by writing SMTP commands by hand.

250 OK id=1HfAwM-00051d-SO

So no problem there. Then I tried to send myself an email using ye goode olde pine on the mail relay host. Nothing. Eaten alive. The mailmonster was definitely on the prowl.

I checked the maillog, and found a disturbing amount of stat=Service unavailable. Not good. At this point, I sat down and poured myself a whiskey. Or, I would have if (1) I was a real private investigator, and (2) I liked whiskey, and (3) I had a free chair. Lacking all of these, I scratched my head substitutively, and thought: "What if I rather try to telnet from the relay host, and not my desktop?". I tried that.

550 X-UiB-SpamReport: *.*.*.* is (rbl.uib.no) blacklisted Mail refused, see http://www.uib.no/it/rbl/

Bingo!

A quick scan through UiB's black list (which can only be reached if you're on the university network) showed that my relay host had been blacklisted when the problems started: 2007-04-19, at 07:43:16. (It must be noted that my growing suspicion was only sparked at around 11:31:21, when I woke up and checked my e-mail that day).

I rushed off an e-mail to the UiB postmaster, rerouted my e-mail through another relay, and now hope for the best.

Mail Hosting

If anybody knows of a good and reliable mail hosting service, possibly in the style of GMail, that allows me to write mail filters comparable to procmail (it is imperative that I can filter on arbitrary mail headers), please let me know.