Jeremy Heslop » business

1&1 tightens up Email spam rules

jeremy — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 21:45:53 +0000

I use 1and1 for my personal and business websites as well as for our clients. We’ve had a client recently that was not receiving emails from one of their colleagues and of course the other company’s IT person said it was our problem. Having been an email administrator for many years I always like to look into the bounced back messages, smtp connection info, email headers, and more to track down a problem. This particular issue was perplexing because there where not many posts on the net about it. When someone was trying to send an email to a domain hosted at 1and1 it sent this error after the RCPT TO line:

421 invalid sender domain, possibly misconfigured

I tested at http://www.wormly.com/test_smtp_server (which is a great site btw) to get test the error.

So I sent an email to 1and1 support to see if they could help. This was the very speedy response:

The circumstances you have just described is caused by a RFC-non-compliant configuration of the despatcher-domain. The MX-Server
of the domain has no registered A-record, but merely a CNAME-record this is why the e-mail is rejected by our e-mail servers.

You can find some general information about this topic here:

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2181.html

To provide the e-mail delivery as fast as possible again, we kindly advise you to inscribe the target domain of the CNAME-record as MX-record. For further information, please contact the provider of the despatcher-domain.

Looks like the 1and1 is blocking any non RFC compliant domains. In the rfc spec above it says:

10.3. MX and NS records

The domain name used as the value of a NS resource record, or part of
the value of a MX resource record must not be an alias.
…

Additional section processing does not include CNAME records, let alone the address records that may be associated with the canonical name derived from the alias.

So if you are a DNS admin or setup DNS for clients make sure to have the MX record for your domains be A records (they directly resolve to an ip) not CNAME records. So far I have had to email a couple of hosting companies related to this issue. I applaud 1and1 for locking down their email servers even more to thwart spam, but it would have been nice to have had a link or faq on their site explaining what was going on. Thus the reason for this lengthy blog post.

Some other posts on the web about this issues:

Useful links to test out DNS and MX records:

Leveraging Online Social Networks to Increase Business

jeremy — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 01:05:48 +0000

I follow the LinkedIn blog in google reader and watched a video about how a small Investment Banking company managed to make over $300k+ by leveraging their contacts on linked in. Ron Lissak, a managing partner of the company, talked about how he was able to search for the right people and find many opportunities through LinkedIn. I’m trying to learn more on how to leverage online resources for my business so I thought I would pass the information along. The LinkedIn blog has been a great read and has presented many ideas for me to expand on. You can read the original article or watch the video below.

LinkedIn Users – Investment Banking

High gas prices and the financial crisis? Get cash back!

jeremy — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 19:30:41 +0000

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was an easy way to get a few extra dollars in your pocket each month to help with high gas prices for your car, truck or suv? Well if you haven’t yet gotten a Discover Card now is the time to do so.

Just this month I have gotten over $60 cash back from just using it for our everyday family purchases (diapers and formula are expensive!)

Now the most important part when getting a cash back credit card is not to spend the cash back! They try and get you to purchase more things which means you spend more money instead of just getting the cash back. Now if those items you purchase are necessary items then by all means go for it, but most of the retailers that they list you could do without.

So if I can’t spend it what do I do with it? Redeem the cash back into your discover account and now you have those extra few dollars for those high gas prices!

You can also get a Discover card called the Open Road card that gives you more cash back for gas and auto purchases than the other Discover cards.

So if you spend money (and who doesn’t) or your a small business owner and want to get a few dollars back for doing what you would do anyway click on one of the links above to get your very own card today.

Small Business Owner Tax Tip (ie how to avoid paying back taxes)

jeremy — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 01:43:12 +0000

Getting a letter from the IRS is never fun, getting a letter from the IRS saying you owe money is even less fun. Over a week ago I received a letter stating that I owed thousands of dollars in back taxes, fees and interest from over a year ago. I must say that I was in shock since this was the first year we had used an accountant for our taxes and I had not done my own. I guess I was so happy I didn’t have to do them that I didn’t even bother looking over them at all.

That was my mistake and my small business owner tip is:

Tip: Look over your taxes and make sure all your income is accounted for. It can save you from having to pay a lot of money later on in back taxes.

So my accountant and I looked over what had happened. We totally overlooked putting two K1′s from my S corporations (taxes flow to owners) on the tax return. Luckily we could make some adjustments to reduce the amount and he paid the fees and interest. Needless to say it was still a big chuck of change, but a learning experience nonetheless. So if you are a small business owner make sure to review your taxes and match up all your documentation before you send in those tax returns. Don’t make the same mistake I did.

Online Banking Setup for GnuCash 2.2.6 under Windows XP

jeremy — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:23:50 +0000

Since my linux raid decided to futz up (read I screwed it up) I’ve been using my Windows partition out of necessity until I have the time to rebuild my software raid 5 and gentoo. Until then we’ve been using GnuCash under Windows which has worked ok, but it is not as nice as the linux version by far. We use GnuCash for our business and it is critical that we have all the functions working in it. One of the things that I really missed was online banking. I could pull in all the transactions and clear them under GnuCash as well as making reconciling alot easier. The reason that GnuCash could not connect to my online bank was that the version of libofx it was saying it was an older version of Quicken and thus was denied from my bank. I read some more online and …

found that you could compile libofx with a new APPVER or binary replace the version in the library file. So I took the easy way out and replaced the string in the .dll file. Here is how I did it:

Downloaded xvi32 hex editor (free)
Opened “C:\Program Files\gnucash\bin\libofx-3.dll” under XVi32
Searched for 1200 as a text string
Found the string that says APPVER right after it and clicked on the 2 of 1200 and hit 5 to make it 1500
Saved the file, started up GnuCash and voila!

In all this I am assuming you already know how to setup GnuCash for Online Banking. If not you can check it out on their ofx setup page. That is it for now. Hope you find this useful as I’m sure I’ll have to come back to this at some point in time in the future!

And remember if you use GnuCash for tracking your expenses and income make sure you have a backup off-site. I recommend Mozy for windows and Mac, but any way you do it you’ll be thankful you did.