A Tiny Rant on Mail

Mail is broken.

This is nothing new. RFC 822, after all, wasn’t the beginning of Internet e-mail, merely an attempt to fix it, which admittedly worked reasonably well for a while. But even with all the brokenness of mail, I wasn’t expecting to dig into my Postfix logs today to find that USENIX couldn’t send me mail because the firm they’ve outsourced to was too lazy to create IN PTR records for their nodes in the cloud.

More annoying than the fact that the IN PTR records aren’t there, though, is that best practice (i.e., fighting spam) dictates that they should be. Considering adding “think about fixing messaging” to the list of Futile Things To Do in 2015.