Yesterday it was hardware, today it was software.
An e-mail that I sent to a bell.ca address was rejected.
Perhaps I am mistaken but I believe that these Bell/Sympatico mailboxes are managed, handled by Yahoo!. And Yahoo! occasionally made my life difficult by either rejecting mail from my server or dropping it in the recipient’s spam folder. I tried to contact them once, but it was hopeless. Never mind that my domain, vttoth.com, is actually a few months older (July 1, 1994 as opposed to January 18, 1995) than Yahoo!’s and has been continuously owned by a single owner. Never mind that my domain was never used to send spam. Never mind that I get plenty of spam from Yahoo! accounts.
Of course you can’t fight city hall. One thing I can do, instead, is to implement one of the protocols Yahoo wants, the DKIM protocol, to authenticate outgoing e-mail, improving its chances of getting accepted.
But setting it up was a bloody nuisance. So many little traps! In the end, I succeeded, but not before resorting to some rather colorful language.
This little tutorial proved immensely helpful, so helpful in fact that I am going to save its contents, just in case:
Very well. It is time to return to more glamorous activities. It’s not like I don’t have things to do.