Spam false positives from British Airways

I note that British Airways e-receipt e-mails are probably going astray for a lot of people.

I've had to book a few flights with BA recently. Up until a couple of weeks ago their acknowledgment e-mails came through fine. And then I stopped receiving them. Taking the time to delve in to the mail logs yesterday I noticed this:

Aug 20 07:47:45 jc sm-mta[15347]: l7KElEmk015347: ruleset=check_mail,
  arg1=website +LHS=RHS@bounce.baplc.com,
  relay=ceba-mgw04.baplc.com [163.166.43.64],
  reject=553 5.1.8 website +LHS=RHS@bounce.baplc.com...
  Domain of sender address website+LHS=RHS@bounce.baplc.com does not exist

(I've redacted the left and right hand side of the actual e-mail address it was being sent to)

If that's just so much gibberish to you, it says that BA are sending e-mails with a return path of ...@bounce.baplc.com. Working through the logs shows that they've been doing this for some time.

But at some point in the last few weeks, someone at BA has removed the bounce.baplc.com entry from their DNS. So my, and countless other systems around the world, will begin rejecting messages.

This rejection is quite correct. Since bounce.baplc.com doesn't exist, my system (and any other system with the same configuration) will have nowhere to send any bounces that might occur. And sending messages from domains that do not exist is also an exceedingly common spammer tactic.

I've used the "Report problems with our site" feature to report this to BA, but I don't have high hopes of anyone listening.

Holy crap, I’m moving to Switzerland!

It's been a bit quiet around here for the last couple of months. A quick brain dump.

In February I left my job helping to run the mail systems at Citigroup, having sorted myself out with a contracting role doing software development in Perl (with some Autosys and Murex mangling on the side) for the nice people at Brevan Howard. Quite definitely some of the nicest people I've had the pleasure of working with in the financial industry. If you're a London-based Perl developer looking for work and the opportunity for a contract with them comes up, jump at it.

Along the way I finally got around to sorting myself out with a Flickr account, and you can see my photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/nikclayton/. Not something I've written much about, but that may change in the future.

Anyway, that proved to be temporary. No, they didn't fire me. Instead, in two days time I jump on a plane bound for Zurich, to start working as a site reliability engineer for Google Switzerland.

I was over there a couple of weeks ago as part of a preview-cum-orientation trip, which coincided with the once-every-three-years Züri Fäscht (Zurich Festival), so I took the opportunity to snap a few shots of fireworks.







Anyway, I hope to write more next week about the process, useful sites for people undergoing a similar move, and so on. That, and getting back to contributing to projects like Subversion -- my free time has been practically non-existent for the past 4 months or so, and that's something that I've let slip.