If you are using the SpamCop realtime block list as part of your anti-spam measures, be warned that they appear to be blocking several legitimate Facebook mail servers.

I’ve seen them blocking the following Facebook mail server IPs:

• 69.63.178.169
• 69.63.178.172
• 69.63.178.175

Presumably there’s a whole block of IPs that SpamCop is blocking. Since I like to get e-mail from Facebook, I have currently disabled my SpamCop RBL check. You may want to do the same.

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I launched a minor update to 10MinuteMail.com last night. It contained:

1. Changed the mail domain to owlpic.com
2. Updated the Russian language translation (thanks to Vladimir)
3. Fixed a bug where replying to an e-mail using a non-latin character set would result in an unreadable e-mail (also thanks to Vladimir for pointing this out)

This last issue was an odd one to fix, so I wanted to document it here (although the same fix can be found elsewhere on the net).

10MinuteMail.com is pretty well internationalized. The site content is translated into over 30 languages and the pages are served as UTF-8. Incoming e-mails are also displayed using UTF-8 and display non-latin character sets correctly. However, until this latest release, if you replied to an e-mail using non-latin characters, the resulting e-mail contained gibberish instead of the correct characters.

I started off by adding UTF-8 as the specified character set for outgoing e-mails. That didn’t help. I added UTF-8 encoding declaration attribute to the form element. That didn’t help. Finally after some frustration, googling, and trying a ton of things, I discovered that for some reason, and I”m not sure if the bug is in JBoss, JSF, Seam, or where exactly, but you have to set the request objects character encoding programmatically for each request, otherwise it will use the wrong encoding on the form contents and you end up with gibberish. The easiest way to solve this that I’ve found so far is to create a small Servlet Filter that sets the encoding on the request, and add that filter in before your Seam filter in your web.xml. It worked for me.

The filter:

package com.digitalsanctuary.seam;

import java.io.IOException;

import javax.servlet.Filter;
import javax.servlet.FilterChain;
import javax.servlet.FilterConfig;
import javax.servlet.ServletException;
import javax.servlet.ServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.ServletResponse;

/**
 * The Class UTF8Filter.
 */
public class UTF8Filter implements Filter {

    /** The Constant UTF_8. */
    private static final String UTF_8 = "UTF-8";

    /**
     * Destroy.
     *
     * @see javax.servlet.Filter#destroy()
     */
    public void destroy() {
    }

    /**
     * Do filter.
     *
     * @param pRequest
     *            the request
     * @param pResponse
     *            the response
     * @param pChain
     *            the chain
     * @throws IOException
     *             Signals that an I/O exception has occurred.
     * @throws ServletException
     *             the servlet exception
     * @see javax.servlet.Filter#doFilter(javax.servlet.ServletRequest, javax.servlet.ServletResponse,
     *      javax.servlet.FilterChain)
     */
    public void doFilter(ServletRequest pRequest, ServletResponse pResponse, FilterChain pChain) throws IOException,
	    ServletException {
	pRequest.setCharacterEncoding(UTF_8);
	pChain.doFilter(pRequest, pResponse);
    }

    /**
     * Inits the.
     *
     * @param arg0
     *            the arg0
     * @throws ServletException
     *             the servlet exception
     * @see javax.servlet.Filter#init(javax.servlet.FilterConfig)
     */
    public void init(FilterConfig arg0) throws ServletException {
    }

}

An excerpt of web.xml:

....
	<filter>
		<filter-name>UTF8 Filter</filter-name>
		<filter-class>com.digitalsanctuary.seam.UTF8Filter</filter-class>
	</filter>

	<filter-mapping>
		<filter-name>UTF8 Filter</filter-name>
		<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
	</filter-mapping>

	<filter>
		<filter-name>Seam Filter</filter-name>
		<filter-class>org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter</filter-class>
	</filter>

	<filter-mapping>
		<filter-name>Seam Filter</filter-name>
		<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
	</filter-mapping>
....

Does anyone have a better fix or know exactly why this happens?

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It’s always funny when different aspects of your lives cross. For instance:

10MinuteMail is one of my projects, and Ulta is a contracting client I do a lot of work for. It’s just funny to see an Ulta ad on 10MinuteMail:)

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You may have noticed 10MinuteMail was unavailable for a few minutes over the last couple of days. 10MinuteMail recently came under a DDOS attack which locked up the site a few times. Most of the malicious traffic came from the Netherlands, Germany, and to a lesser extend other European countries and the USA. Initially I dealt with it by generating a list of the malicious IPs and adding them to my block list. However, the DDOS kept spreading (botnet?) so I finally did what I should have done ages ago, and tuned my CSF/IPTables firewall to block DDOS patterns. So far so good:)

I have NO IDEA why anyone would be attacking 10MinuteMail. It’s very odd.

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I was recently contacted by SortFix who introduced their offering to me and thought maybe I’d be interested in writing a blog post about SortFix. (full disclosure: I have received nothing from SortFix other than their e-mail request).

SortFix is basically a value added search provider who wraps Google search results. Their approach is to analyze other keywords which appear frequently in your search results. You can then drag these other high frequency keywords to either the “Add to search” box, or the “Remove” box. There’s also a “Dictionary” box which defines keywords you may not know.

For example, if you search for “RS6“, you’ll get “Power words” like “v10″, “performance”, “audi”, “carlos”, 2010″, “2003″, “juan”, etc… By adding or removing those keywords, you can tune your search for either the 2003 edition of the RS6, or the new 2010 one, or you can check out the king of Spain, Juan Carlos’, ride.

I can see this being useful for people who don’t have super good Google-Fu. I don’t see myself using it, but I can see it being useful for many other folks. Another point against it is that currently it’s a Flash based interface, and generally I avoid Flash as much as possible. Apparently they are working on a non-Flash version, which would be a nice improvement IMHO.

I really like the idea the idea of offering up high frequency additional keywords to people who are searching for things to help them refine their search. I can see this being very useful for onsite eCommerce searching, helping narrow down products based on common attributes, etc…

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