Holden's Blog

Capture of Yahoo! Desktop transmitting auth information Originally uploaded by dmcopernicus I've never really intended for this blog to be about security, but sometimes it just lands in your lap. Taking a break from my regular coding and school work, I went to the Yahoo "hacku" day in Waterloo . I wrote a basic system to help me deal with the problem of false negatives in e-mail spam which I'm planning on improving on. Since, like the majority of students I know, I use Gmail I initially made my program work with gmail. However, since the food was being purchased by Yahoo, I figured I should try and make my system work with Yahoo as well. At first glance, it didn't seem possible. Yahoo! doesn't presently offer IMAP support, and all the cool parts of there mail API require a pro account (which I later got, but didn't have at the time). Doing some digging, suggested that Yahoo did syncing for the new Yahoo Zimbra desktop product over IMAP , which wasn't ...

I've expanded the blacklists quiried and added a few more tests. I've also re-factored some of the code so doing matching with masks is much cleaner. You can grab the latest version of dnsrbl from hackage Sadly I lost the comments that I got on irc from an untimely combination of server reboot (with my screen session) and laptop hoboing. If you have any comments on how I can improve this drop me a line at holden@pigscanfly.ca . For the next bit of my spam filter funtimes I'm planning on playing around with some python code, which should be a fun learning experience (although I feel I'm a bit late to the python party).

I'm pleased to announce that I've uploaded my first ever module to hackage (so please be kind, but suggestions are warmly accepted). The module looks up a hostname (or a hostname & hostaddress) on a set of DNSRBLs. This is probably of use only to a very small percentage of people (the application I've created it for is anti-spam and I can't really see any use outside of that). But with that being said check out my DNSRBL module ,or on hackage along with the classy documentation .