Peter Hansteen
nxdomain.no/~peter · Personal blog · on HN since 2022
Peter Hansteen writes about OpenBSD, pf, spam fighting with greytrapping, and running mail servers such as OpenSMTPD.
What HN saysHN commenters link his posts on mail systems, OpenSMTPD and moving off Exim, and one finds his mail provider article especially interesting.
15HN people shared it
4linked it in comments
20stories submitted
40story points
5 months agolast shared
2022people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Eighteen Years of Greytrapping – Is the Weirdness Paying Off?3 people · 7 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 2OpenSMTPD Is the Mail Server for the Future3 people · 2 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 3A Major Mail Provider Demonstrate They Likely Do Not Understand Mail at All2 people · 2 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 4The Despicable, No Good, Blackmail Campaign Targeting Imaginary Friends?1 people · 4 points · first shared 2022 · 1 comments on HN
- 5Three Minimalist Spamd Configurations for Your Spam Fighting Needs (OpenBSD)1 people · 3 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
- 6I asked ChatGPT to write a pf.conf to spec1 people · 3 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 7What has (can) the EU Cyber Resilience Act done (do) for you?1 people · 3 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 8The Things Spammers Believe – A Tale of 300k Imaginary Friends1 people · 3 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 9A Simpler Life: Trapping Spambots Based on Target Domain Only1 people · 2 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
- 10Fun Facts About the April 2024 Cisco Attack Data1 people · 2 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
- 11The Book of PF, 4th Edition: It's Here, It's Real1 people · 2 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 12You Have Installed OpenBSD. Now for the Daily Tasks1 people · 2 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 13All Modern Digital Infrastructure1 people · 1 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 14Does Your Email Provider Know What a "Joejob" Is? (2016)1 people · 1 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 15What every IT person needs to know about OpenBSD1 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
bigwheels · 2026-04-06
OT: This site has another recent article I found even more interesting-
A Major Mail Provider Demonstrate They Likely Do Not Understand Mail At All https://nxdomain.no/~peter/they_do_not_understand_mail_at_all.html
Gotta love the email self-hoster holdouts, mad props and respect.
peter_hansteen · 2022-10-09
Yes, some idiot keeps adding the "porn" tag to the site for some reason.
Anyway, the article in question is also available, trackerless and with "classic" formatting at https://nxdomain.no/~peter/better_off_with_pf.html - normally my WIP to show early reviewers spot.
upofadown · 2026-05-19
The big news for some of us is that Exim has been dropped from ports. Here is a good article about transitioning from Exim to OpenSMTPD:
https://nxdomain.no/~peter/time_for_opensmtpd.html
I tried using OpenSMTPD a long time ago, shortly after it came out, but things were not stable enough. I guess it is time to give it another go...
Arnt · 2026-01-09
The redacted screenshot at https://nxdomain.no/~peter/blogpix/likely_suspicious.jpg indicates that the sending server used an IPv6 address that ends with the digits 19. The SPF record for bsdly.net includes two IPv6 addresses, neither of them ends with 19. It also includes some more things, up to three layers of indirection so I'm not sure I checked everything, but I didn't see …19 anywhere.
I suspect that what we have here is a misconfiguration at bsdly.net and perhaps a poorly chosen error message at gmail.