Stop using NJABL! Now!

I just replied to an email from a guy who thinks I'm blocking his mail. I'm not, because I don't run a blacklist or a spam filter, and haven't done so for years. I would have loved to have helped guide him in the right direction, but my reply to him bounced because his mail server is misconfigured to use the NJABL blacklist.

The NJABL blacklist has been dead for almost five years.

If you still have it in your email server configuration, you're now going to block a lot of wanted mail. Because the domain's name servers just changed and they have a wildcard entry that now has the effect of "blacklisting the world."

You were warned...almost five years ago.

Characters in the local part of an email address

Need a "common sense" breakdown showing you what characters should be allowed in the username part (local part) of an email address? This handy guide from Jochen Topf covers exactly that.

It doesn't EXACTLY align with RFCs, but when you look at it from a common sense perspective, I agree with his categorization of each character. This would be a good thing to reference if you were building your own email capture form. (I'd probably also reject the "maybes" for an email capture form, but not reject them in an MTA configuration. Some of the "maybes" show up in bounce addresses somewhat regularly, but are almost never found in legitimate end user email addresses.)