Man kann sich noch so sehr Mühe geben, irgendwann wird auch die best behütetste E-Mail Adresse gnadenlos Opfer von Spammern. Wer seine Mails mit Outlook und Co abfragt, kann in der Regel mit einigermaßen wirksamen Tools einen Großteil dieses Datenmülls abfangen, bevor man dazwischen die wichtigen Dinge des Lebens (egal ob Mail von Tante Trude oder die Rechnung von der Telekom) mit dem Geigerzähler suchen muß.

Ganz besonders deutlich ist mir das mit den Mail-Accounts all meiner Domains bei all-inkl aufgefallen. Ich habe also ein wenig gegoogelt und stellte fest, daß sich viele Leute in den einschlägigen Foren über hoffnungslos viel Spam auf Mailkonten von all-inkl beklagten. In allen Fällen waren immer nach einger Zeit plötzlich Unmengen von Spam eingegangen. Ich kann mich da sogar noch glücklich schätzen, daß ich pro Tag und pro Account „nur“ etwa 200-300 Spammails erhalten habe.

Was mich allerdings stutzig werden lies, waren Berichte von vielen anderen all-inkl Kunden, die auch meine Beobachtung unterstützten: Betroffen waren immer auch Adressen, die überhaupt nicht eingesetzt wurden! Ich muß ja beruflich bedingt viele E-Mail Newsletter abonnieren und legte dafür immer ein dediziertes Postfach bei all-inkl an. Manche dieser Postfächer, deren Alias zum Teil auch kryptisiert angelegt waren, wurden aber nicht eingesetzt und trotzdem traf nach einiger Zeit tonnenweise Spam ein. Seltsam, nicht? -In den Foren wird daher recht offenherzig diskutiert, ob nicht eventuell all-inkl providerseitig die Tore aufmacht und Postfächer in den kleinen Paketen mit Spam zuschütten läßt, damit diese Kunden den optionalen Spamschutz buchen. Wenn da was dran wäre, müßte man all-inkl als unseriösen Provider bezeichnen.

Ich habe daher mal einen Test gemacht und eine Yahoo-Adresse in einigen all-inkl Postfächern als Kopieempfänger eingetragen. Das Ergebnis war äußerst aufschlußreich: Vom einen auf den anderen Tag kam plötzlich NULL Spam mehr auf diesen Postfächern an! Heißt: Weder im Weiterleitungsziel (Yahoo Postfach), noch in dem ursprünglichen all-inkl Postfach! Na, das muß mir jetzt mal jemand erklären dachte ich und hab genau dies dem Support geschrieben. Die Antwort kam wie immer innerhalbt weniger Minuten:

Hallo,

bei Emailweiterleitungen bzw. Kopieempfängern ist automatisch Greylisting aktiv. Damit soll verhindert werden, dass damit zu viele Spammails an andere Server weitergeleitet werden und dadurch unsere Server in Spamlisten kommen. Da Greylisting ein Annahmefilter ist, gilt dieser in dem Fall auch für das Postfach für das der Kopieempfänger angelegt ist.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Hxxxx Gxxxxx
Support Team

Hm, und das heißt? -Sinngemäß: All-inkl hat eine Notbremse, die sie dann ziehen, wenn deren Server Gefahr laufen, woanders geblacklisted zu werden oder schlicht zu glühen. Denn, man rechne sich mal aus, wenn das jeder machte. All-inkl zahlt ja auch für Bandbreiten und Traffic. Schade nur, daß sie uns Kunden glauben machen wollen, daß wir ohne deren Spamfilter nicht mehr leben können. Aber gut, das ist eben Marketing…

Bisher habe ich noch keine E-Mail vermißt (Stichwort False Positives), daher kann ich das zur Nachahmung nur dringend empfehlen:

1. In den KASserver einloggen
2. E-Mail > E-Mail Postfach, dort die betreffende E-Mail Adresse bearbeiten
3. Unter „Kopieempfänger“ die Freemailer-Adresse eintragen, auf die weitergeleitet werden soll
4. Freemailer-Spamfilter besonders in der Anfangsphase täglich kontrollieren und ab und an sich selbst Testmails von anderen Adressen schicken, um Zuverlässigkeit der Weiterleitung sicherzustellen.

Obwohl für mich all-inkl zweifelsohne zu den besten Providern in Deutschland gehört und ich daher all-inkl jedem empfehle, der mich nach günstigem aber trotzdem performanten Webspace mit Datenbank und Co fragt, bleibt ein seltsamer Beigeschmack bezüglich des Umgangs mit Spam.

As some of my regular visitors have probably noticed, my other/former domain martinwetzel.com was not available for at least a week. Reason was, that I switched to a new provider, and somewhere between me, my old provider and my new provider a very simple fax must have gotten lost. Since I heavily doubt that, I’d rather be so keen and assume another case of stupidity or mental challenge at least at one of the companies. Or -since we talk of German firms- a consequently unprofessional workflow. Those who have witnessed me live talking to service representatives or know my style of writing can imagine that those guys wished they had a different job during the past week.
Anyways, it’s fixed now. Nevertheless, if you visit martinwetzel.com, you will only find a ‚temporarily closed‘ banner. The reason why I did not start preparing the upcoming content is simply that until Monday I didn’t even know for sure whether my domain remains my property or will be deleted and given back to NIC. Moreover, I am currently restyling Alice’s pages and this requires a lot of time. And since time is to be regarded a scarce resource even for a student, I get tired doing 3 domains parallel pretty fast. Note that there are no changes whatsoever regarding email-adresses.
So, to sum up the whole thing:
– martinwetzel.com is back, but still awaiting transformation to my CV-page
- photos.martinwetzel.com has been replaced by photos.traumdieb.com (however, for the transition time you will be redirected)
- photos.traumdieb.com now also contains a photoblog and up-to-date galleries for every month (more to come in the future)
- alter/adjust your bookmarks, but not the email-adresses and please DO write once in a while!

the only excuse for not blogging for so long is the weather and all the activities related to it. however, i have made several attempts in the past days to blog, but somehow i could not get the animated gif i wanted to share with the audience to an acceptable filesize (yes, there are still visitors using dial-up…), which was driving me crazy. now you guys wonder what the planned content was, and i will not fail to report my sheer exitement about a stunning afternoon at krefeld’s horse-racing circuit. don’t get me wrong, i still like horses best when smoked, sliced and on my sandwich -or at least from a secure distance-; but seeing these powerful animals flexing their muscles as they race for victory with sharp eyes and flying hair is truly an impressive scene. although we pretended to inspect the horses before the race (mainly by imitating the viewes and analytical talk the people next to us held), we didn’t place any bets. that was due to the fact that of the three horses i judged as either ‚cripple‘, ‚tired‘ or ‚weak‘, two were among the top three and the other ranked fifth. so, when it comes to judging horses, next time i stick to my taste ;) — back home in hessen we had high-percentage sit-ins with my cousin (i haven’t seen her for at least 5 years) and my uncle. the next day, we made the first big move in my grandma’s house. my father had arranged for a huge van we filled up with equally old and heavy furniture, which was supposed to be my sister’s and my stake of the heritage. dividing up heritage-stuff in an empty house is a pretty shitty thing for all being involved, i can tell you. — today, alice and i booked our rental car for our holidays in crete. after having checked several rental companies, we were left with holiday autos and sunny cars, both offering almost the same price and conditions. as we found, it’s of crucial importance to select a rental company offering unlimited insurance coverage, especially referring to our irish outback action when we were lucky to have the extra insurance waiver. i just hope that everything works out as planned, since i tried to change our flights today. i must say, i was a little surprised when i checked the travel voucher with the tickets and all, as i had to find the flight’s duration to be almost 5 hours! gee, in five hours you can almost get to jo-burg. now, since we booked a direct flight from d?sseldorf earliest in the morning, i had to find that our flight stops at frankfurt, meaning that i could have boarded in frankfurt at a way more pleasant time due to an unmentioned change in the flight schedule. now, i am very curious how the travel-agency will handle my complaint and whether the airline is able and willing to change the booking to, all other variables being equal, frankfurt. — since my last blog, i have made a step towards movabletype: i bought webspace with all-inkl.com! so, i will surprise the interested visitor on www.traumdieb.com (which is still empty as i am writing this) with my first tryouts in mt shortly. i haven’t made up my mind yet how i will go on with this domain here, but my blog will definitely move to traumdieb.com. i am simply too much pissed by blogger and haloscan. new designs are already in the pipeline, but need thematic round-up, so to say. also, my photopages will have some decent rennovation (and an update, of course) as soon as i get accquainted with php and sql. besides, for those being interested in the dialect of my home village, i have put lots of work into mein-burgsolms.de lately, so check it out if you like. stay awake!

first and most important: i passed finance! now i can only hope that i don’t become a victim of post-publication changes. at maastricht university, everything is possible, you know?! i cannot put in words how relieved i am! this burden is off me, and that makes me really happy. the other nice thing is that i also passed my exam for information management, which together with the good finance-news means that i am done with maastricht, except for the thesis which i will start to start with in the next days (depending on my enthusiasm). — currently, i am making my first migration attempts: away from blogger and towards movabletype. i have tried installing the mother of all content management systems on a test-account from all-inkl.com, which is very likely to become my new webhosting provider in the very near future. i might switch to them just because i am no more willing to pay the high prices at 1&1, although i have no complaints about their current service whatsoever. but i would need to pay 25 euros a month for the features and tools i would need for movabletype and that’s definately not worth it. with php, my image-galleries and structure of content will reach a completely new dimension. at least this is what webmaster martin is aiming at ;). so, my friends, i will keep you posted, awright?