Spam Free Email

I’ve spent about 30% of my time learning how Erlang programs are suppose to be designed using OTP and the only thing that I can take as a 100% fact is the documentation is not good enough.

I did find some great how-to documents at trapexit.org. While they still make some assumptions about how much the reader knows about erlang and the OTP their how-to’s are much easier to dissect and have much more documentation in the code. It’s almost inspired me enough to completely document my own code … almost …

In the end, once you’ve gotten OTP working in your Erlang programs it make things much simpler. You do end up creating a lot of code over and over again, but the error correction and supervision is well worth it in code that needs to have the maximum amount of up time.

While working on the SMTP server, I was noticing that the code was crashing 4 or 5 times a day. While I did not change the code, I did add OTP aspects and supervisors and the code started to run without any noticeable down time. While I have fixed the problems that I think were causing the crashes now, the OTP design handled the restarts effortlessly and let me get past the little things.

Right now I’m in the process of understanding how a full supervision tree with multiple worker processes is put together. Once I have that I’ll have a rock solid SMTP server with nearly 100% up-time.

While I am in the process of creating my own anti-spam email server I have been using two of my older domain names as test domains. I retired both domains on April 1st, 2005 and both domains had between 500 and 1,000 active using at the time I retired them.

It is now seven months later and these two domains are still getting spam like you wouldn’t believe.

As part of my server and the statistics that I am planning on keeping I started tracking the unique IP Addresses that are making connections to these two domains. The first day of tracking any I have nearly 1100 unique IP addresses that have made connections, and this is only since midnight.

Not only that but I often see the same IP address making multiple connections in a short period of time.

Of course this just going to and fuel to the argument that spam is a larger problem then people realize. Even those of us who complain about it constantly