Giving greylisting another go

Well, my spam/virus amounts have increased already to over 300 per day, and the unfortunate thing is that around 10-20 of them get through SpamAssassin, ClamAV and Bayesian analysis. So I thought I’d retry greylisting, which means that all MTAs that aren’t already known get a rude “temporarily not available”. If they retry their message later, the message is accepted. This blocks most open relays and viral machines, since they only send the messages once and then forget about them.

However, this will only be a small relief, since much of my mail comes from other sites that just forward the mail to my central staging area. And these sites will handle greylisting quite nicely. I’m still planning on adding recipient whitelisting, meaning that any people I’ve sent mail to get an added non-spam bonus when they send mail back to me.

Software design

Thoughts on “Bringing design to software”.

5 core processes of interaction design: understand, abstract, structure, represent, detail.

Design languages are used to create products and help in learning to use them. An effective language brings coherence, relevance, and quality.

Development: characterization (of current languages), reregistration (of a new assumption set), development and demonstration (of language elements in scenarios, sketches or prototypes), evaluation (in context), and evolution.

Black-box designs can be foolproof, but lead to impoverished communities of practice. Transparent-box design reveals the functionality (as appropriate), allowing comprehension and skill development.

The more important a product is for the user, the more trouble he is ready to accept (threshold of indignation).

Action-centered design focuses on linguistic distinctions, standard practices, actions that need coordination among people, tools (usable without thought), breakdowns, and ongoing concerns.

Innovation demands that prototypes drive specifications, not vice versa. Rapid prototyping cycles are also necessary for quickly answering questions about design. Prototypes need to be community property (public) to be useful in eg. facilitating communications and redesign.