Mail problem... solved?

Sometime in the early part of my recent absence, I began to suspect something not right with onegin. Specifically, mail sent from the machine wasn't arriving (I found that out accidentally, after several mail messages sent to a Web account never made it).

In troubleshooting the problem via an ssh login session from Kazakhstan, it turned out that mail I was sending from onegin through my DSL service provider (CenturyTel) was now no longer being accepted. After grumbling for a few moments, I got to thinking and realized the step made sense from the perspective of curtailing spam sent from 'robots' that had inveigled their way onto the machines of ordinary users. Thus, any mail that was not explicitly marked as being
From: cd45ter97@centurytel.net (not my real address, BTW) was not going to be accepted from my connection.

Which was a problem, until I took another look at the postfix program that sends and receives mail for onegin.

Long ago, for reasons not clear to me now, I had instructed postfix to use the CenturyTel smtp server as a relay when sending mail. I seem to vaguely recall this being a good idea, since once the mail had been handed off to the CenturyTel machine, it was out of onegin's hands, so that if the destination machine was busy or unavailable, the CenturyTel machine would nonetheless try to deliver the mail several times.

It turns out that, if I tell postfix to simply deliver the mail directly, it will do so without any problem (so far, according to the mail log). Presumably, if the destination machine is busy or offline, the message will be queued and repeated delivery attempts will be undertaken by the postfix program on onegin.

We'll see how this works out in the long run.

Cheers...

A remarkable set of pictures...

There's an incredible series of pictures of the flight of SpaceShipOne here.

Cheers...

An interesting idea...

From a post titled Email Reloaded, from Matthew Mullenweg's blog. Matt is one of the lead developers of WordPress.

So the long and short of it is, I’m loading all the email I receive into a database using a fun combination of Procmail, Spam Assassin, and a sprinkling of command line PHP. I’m very excited about this, more excited than I’ve been about a new project in a while. For me, email has been steadily waning in utility for the past year, and I want to breathe new life into it. I’m tired of folders. I’m tired of slow searching. I don’t want to hand my email over to someone else, even if it’s Google. I don’t want to deal with mbox or IMAP or maildir or any of that junk. Those are implementation details of various servers and clients.

Mirroring my email into a MySQL database has some interesting ramifications. Imagine instant Gmail-type searching using FULLTEXT or LIKE. Imagine instant email backup using MySQL replication. Think email RSS feeds, keyed on searches or senders or anything. Don’t forget the interesting metrics that can be extracted from this as well. Right now I’ve replaced my timely dozen with an counter running since this morning. If you send me an email, you’ll see it increment live. If it increments the spam counter you may want to resend it and reword your mortgage suggestion. This is the most basic of a hundred interesting things that can be culled from this data.

[Emphasis mine.]

Amen to the text I bolded. Besides specific messages with specific attachments, email has certainly become more of a burden than anything as time goes by.

In fact, since repairing onegin, the CRM114 spam filter has winnowed out nearly 40 MB of spam. Granted, that includes a backlog of mail that had been accumulating (2000 messages) since onegin went down, but I seem to recall the figure was merely 25 MB this morning, after drawing down the backlog.

Lots of paper chased today, but the pile of stuff to be done seems to not have gone down that much. Ah, well.

Cheers...