There is a body, the W3c, which develops standards on which all web pages should be constructed. They have a page where you can test your website for compliance – here it is: http://validator.w3.org/

As an embryonic web developer back in the miasma that was in the days of Internet Explorer 2, Netscape 3 and AOL’s very own custom browser, standards were a right royal pain. Just getting a page to work and display was success enough. Now things have changed, the world has moved on.

There is a rich satisfaction when the green square of validation reveals itself that perhaps only someone who has struggled with proprietary html tags and attributes can understand. This is often followed by an intense depression as testing reveals that beautifully crafted html, that perfect layout which works in all modern browsers actually chokes Internet Explorer 6. Yes, it’s still out there. Yes we have to cater for it.

But I digress. We can write html which validates. Is there ever a case for allowing non-validating html code? I think the answer has to be a guarded “yes, sometimes”.  Why? Well, once upon a time if you had come to jewelion.com you would have seen the proud boast “always bespoke”.  Things have changed, the world has moved on. There’s so much that can be done in such a sophisticated manner that it is just not practical to develop it all from the ground up, to engage in needless wheel re-invention. Take the little carousel on the front page of this website – someone has developed that and very kindly made it available. However, they didn’t pay close attention to standards and it doesn’t validate. At first it produced over 20 errors – I have corrected them but there remains one.

As the page works – is the existence of one validation issue important? I think not.

While checking all was well in cyberspace, imagine my horror at discovering that the mailserver was in fact on a blacklist for abhorrent behaviour. Now, years of experience has taught the value of a certain fastidiousness when it comes to making sure that the mailerver is locked down to prevent abuse by spammers and/or scammers. However there it was, in black and white: I was officially a backscatterer!

Backscatter isn’t a particularly nice sounding term. Indeed it conjures up images of unfortunate medical conditions – the least said the better. But, in order to get to grips with it, we need to have some understanding of what it means.

When an email arrives at the mailserver there are two basic options. The server can accept it and take delivery of it for further processing or it can REJECT it there and then, ie refuse to handle it. Having accepted the email, if the server then finds it is unable to deliver it to the appropriate mailbox it can then DROP or BOUNCE the message. DROP means, just that, forget the message ever existed and delete it. Not always a good idea because the sender of the message  will not know it didn’t reach its target.  BOUNCE is much friendlier because the sender is notified of non-delivery.

As we know spammers often send their emails with a forged “From address”. Also they also try their luck by sending emails to a vast combination of names @yourdomain.co.uk in the hope that some are valid. If the server is set up to accept the email, then check to see if the user exists and if it doesn’t, to BOUNCE the email back, and if the From address is forged then that unfortunate and entirely innocent address is going to be on the receiving end of a lot of spam.

The answer is to set the server to check that recipient address is valid before accepting it. If it is not then to REJECT it, which stops the process then and there.

Backscatter.org maintains the blacklist. They’re not a particularly pleasant bunch, requiring money if you wish to be removed from their list – you can opt to wait for a month and let the listing expire if you’d rather not pay. Which is what I did.