💬 Micro: 2026-06

Some time ago I posted about my experience blocking one country and some ASNs directly via iptables from my mail server. It seems like there’s an even better source of IPs and networks to block.

The Spamhaus “Don’t Route Or Peer Lists (DROP)” lists.

Currently my mail setup is configured to block everything from these lists. After that, failed login attempts are blocked using fail2ban. And both Postscreen and Rspamd are configured with the usual DNS block lists (like Spamhaus), but also with Abusix.

So far I have received no single spam mail since moving to this new setup. Also, the number of logged spam delivery tries is greatly reduced. All the legitimate emails I wanted to receive the last days came through.

Using simplemailservice.eu also still works great as my outbound relay.

Fun fact: All the ASNs I manually blocked before are on the DROP list. I let AI write a small script that uses the bgp.tools table.txt to find the IPs for them.

Why spend 80 € on a simple cap? Because it fits my big head perfectly, is very comfortable, offers good sun protection, is high-quality, and also keeps me from being blinded by the sun. With this cap and my hat, my collection of summer headwear should now be complete.

We recently had a test photo shooting with our wedding photographer. The photos that came out of this session are beautiful. I took the chance to finally update my profile picture (the last one was from 2022) with a cropped version of one of the new photos. My appearance has actually changed quite a bit, especially over the past year. I have new glasses, a beard now, and shorter hair.

I took my bike out for a short ride again yesterday. The last days it was rainy and stormy, but yesterday, there was a bit of sun again. Also wind, but I took it relaxed. Nature also really calmed me down. I haven’t really realized sunset is so late, and I can still easily start a short ride in the evening.

Many news sites, including a few German ones, are now trying to get you to add them as a preferred source on Google. This can be annoying. Why should I do this? And why do you try to remind me on every visit? And why do you even assume I am using Google News? Are the sites so desperate because AI is reducing the number of people visiting them?