It is a question that comes up frequently at our Tech Support – OK, the email was blacklisted by the Sender Blacklist, but which item triggered the blacklisting exactly?

The upcoming ORF release will offer three handy improvements to help answering these questions.

Predecessors of ORF 5 already support entering optional comments with IP, email, keyword, etc. expressions and these are logged on a hit. This can help identifying the expression in question. Due to a technical constraint, however, these comments were logged as “(Unicode comment cannot be displayed)” if they contained any characters outside the 7-bit ASCII table, which is pretty much the Latin alphabet and numbers only. We overcame this constraint in ORF 5 and now the logged comments are fully Unicode-compliant. Let you speak Russian or Danish, you can use your national alphabet without limitation.

Expression comments are sadly omitted in many cases, though, and ORF has nothing to log. Nothing is lost either; we have two features for these cases.

The first one is very simple: one-click sortable lists. Remember the Sort button next to the lists in ORF 4? It is gone. It really should not have been there in the first place. Bad, bad Sort button. Lists are ought to get sorted by one click in the header, because that is the maximum effort to be exerted to make order and find things.

The second one is a bit more exciting: the Test button that took over the place of the Sort button (which is, again, gone, forever) for every major list. Say you want figure out which Sender Blacklist expression blacklisted emails from my-bosses-best-friend@example.com (ouch!), but the log did not reveal any further information. Just click Test, enter my-bosses-best-friend@example.com and you will get a live, editable list of expressions matching that address. Like *@example.com. Turns out it was not the best.idea.ever, but hey, now you can fix it.

Stay tuned, we are coming back with more next week.