• 5 Posts
  • 423 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 16th, 2023

help-circle
  • Most 365 mail admin work doesn’t end up touching the routing stuff, domains, or DNS records too often, so I’m by no means an expert. Last year I got rid of the last on-prem exchange servers in our environment. Here are my thoughts anyway, for what its worth.

    At my workplace, domain as internal relay was used as part of our hybrid exchange setup, where we still had an on-prem exchange server largely for recipient management (for stuff connected to AD objects and thus mastered on-prem instead of in the cloud) and for a mail relay for internal recipients so that automated emails coming from legacy systems bypassed all filtering. I’m not familiar with other use cases.


    Stuff that may not apply (minimize the lift)

    I would approach this by using it as an opportunity to raze those hundreds of redirects. Surely the recieving systems have other ways to categorize incoming email than destination address. Stuff like system to system you could probably add shit in the body text and change the filters on the recieving end. So each external system would only have one destination address. That’s ideal world though and probably touches a lot of shit outside your control.

    Second thing is that I would look into setting the destination email addresses directly in the sending system. It takes management out of your hands, but why does any of this need to hit your infra in the first place? Again, that’s ideal world and also probably touches shit you don’t control.

    Point is, I’d look to minimize how many of these things you actually have to deal with, because they’ll just keep being a problem and a pain in the ass to manage forever otherwise. That’s the real underlying problem, if you can do anything about it.


    Stuff that more directly lines up with your ask:

    If you can script routing rules you can probably figure out scripting the creation of contact objects in 365, and export of them to csv for verification.

    PowerShell is going to be your friend with Exchange Online/365, and most things Microsoft. Exchange Online has a dedicated module (think library if you’re used to terminology for other languages).

    You can make a csv with the internal email address, external destination address, internal contact name, display name, and whether or not it’s hidden from the address book (do end users need to send to it?). I’d reccomend using some clear prefix in the internal name to keep them obvious compared to any other contacts not related to this fuckery.

    You could use full mailboxes and forwarding rules on each one but that increases complexity significantly.

    In PowerShell, you’d connect to exchange, import the csv, then foreach over the csv contents throwing the values from it into New-MailContact.

    If you want to be fancy you could wrap New-MailContact in a try/catch to spit failed ones out into an array and export that back to csv at the end for review.






  • As others have said, I guarantee there are movements and organzing happening in your area.

    Don’t be the person shouting that others aren’t doing enough when you aren’t doing more than complain online.

    Use this energy. It’s kind of hilarious that you’re complaining about how people are fighting amongst themselves while you’re doing it too.

    Some people have to focus on survival, and don’t have the energy to do more. That’s by design. Intentional design by those in power. So if you have that energy, go do for them. Work with unions and local lawmakers to improve conditions for the people living paycheck to paycheck instead of trying to shame them into just magically having more energy after ensuring they’ll be able to eat and have a place to stay.



  • Part of the issue, admittedly, is that there’s a bunch. Many have outdated info as well.

    NAACP guide seems written for a more peaceful era, but is a good place to start.

    Rescue our Democracy similarly has some oversights when it comes to tech safety, but at least mentions wearing a mask.

    I’m not finding the better guides right now.

    The big things as far as reducing identification that I’m not seeing is that beyond face coverings and the like to prevent facial recognition, don’t bring your real phone and if you do keep it powered off in a faraday bag.

    Phones are still traceable when in airplane mode, and while powered off, through bluetooth low power mode. This is what many countries used for covid exposure tracking. The only defense agaist this tracking is having your phone in a faraday bag that it doesn’t leave until you are out of the protest area, or simply not bringing it.

    There are a few ways to get burner phones not tied to your identity. If you wanted to go that route, you’d want to do the opposite. Keep the burner in the faraday bag at home and only use it out at protest locations, alongside the advice from those two guides as far as disabling biometrics, etc.

    I’ll try and find some better guides later today.





  • Depends on the program. I’ve got a handful of that old on CDs that still install fine. Checked when I was backing them up to ISO. There’s little bits of weirdness and unintended behavior while running them now, but they still install and run to a fairly acceptable degree.

    That experience varies wildly though. Wine tends to handle things better and more consistently.


  • It’s even better when you can’t do most of the socially acceptable de-stressing vices due to health conditions.

    My lungs are fucky with asthma, so no smonking or vaping. Genetically recessive liver issue that I hit the jackpot on means I can’t drink, or have too much sugar, or long term it might just fucking fibros-ify my lungs. Short-term it gives me migraines, nausea, and exhaustion if I try to cheat it or forget. Leads to some really sucky times after holidays when I just eat too much dessert.

    I’m not going to self harm. Body is enough of a mess without adding extra pain and scarring.

    Jacking off and gaming it is then.