Excessive

Fuzzy Mail

Fuzzy Mail is a spam filter for forwarded messages by cPanel... basically this is the deal. When you set up a forward in cPanel, it takes a copy of every email recieved by the source address (ie. jordan@webkore.net) and sends a copy to the forward (ie. assintercourse@bumsluts.com), that way both e-mail addresses get a copy. Why would you do this? Well, you may want a copy of the e-mail at two different places, or a copy sent to your phone so it alerts you that you have a new e-mail, or keeping track of e-mails in a dual OS enviroment. Regardless of why you'd want it, both Anthony and I do, but we quickly noticed a bug within cPanel that was seriously annoying.

There is a spam filter in cPanel that blocks spam messages from being downloaded by your mail client... handy right? Yes! Very much so! The problem is, when there is a forward on the address, it forwards everything, even the spam, so while the source account (ie. jordan@webkore.net) stays clean of spam, all this spam is being forwarded without being checked to the forward (ie. hugegenitals@intheear.net). Obviously that's not acceptable, but cPanel had no solution, so that's where the Webkore programming, research and development, and design and technology teams come in (ie. me). It was up to me to figure out a way to filter forwarded spam, while letting through non-spam.

It took me about half a day to develop the solution...and basically, in cPanel, we forward all mail to a single drop box, then Fuzzy Mail checks the dropbox, deletes the spam, then forwards the mail based on who it was addressed to originally. Confusing? Tell me about it.. by the end of this project, I wanted to kill myself. It wasn't very fun to make, extremely difficult and time consuming to test, and it just wasn't something that I had much fun doing.

We've got it running as a cron every 1 minute now, and it seems to be working fine so I'm happy that I probably don't have to go back to it, at least not for a long time, when I could justify a re-write. At least we're spam free now.

Webkore Went Down on Who!?

Sorry if anyone was faced with a 'cannot connect' error earlier today, Webkore faced some downtime (if you know what I mean) earlier today due to some peice of shit router in Washington, something we, nor anyone else, had any control over, so we can't even blame anyone correctly. So far there hasn't been a backlash, and while Tony and myself were pretty damn stressed and frustrated because of it, we came out of it okay. Server load and stuff are back down to normal (below 1 right Tony? haha, freak!), so things look like they're back on track.

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