2012-03-02



And for the third day, I worked on my email setup.

Today, I moved the rest of the mail accounts and updated the  DNS
accordingly.  Now everything runs on the new machine and it seems
to run fine.

After cleanup and backup work, I terminated  my  webspace  rental
with effect for June. Finally!


Well, one thing is still left to do: Fight the spam. :-( Current-
ly  I  receive  a  lot  of  spam. I can take that for some weeks.
Worse is that the spam reaches recipients of  my  mailing  lists,
too.  They shouldn't have to take it.

As a first shot, I disallowed non-subscribed  addresses  to  send
messages  to  the list. I don't like this policy, because I don't
want to force people to subscribe when it's me who wants to  know
what  they  like  to say. Reporting bugs for instance needs to be
minimal work.  Hence, I hacked my mailing list software (minimal-
ist)  to  forward  mails from not-subscribed senders to myself. I
encapsulated the original messages in RFC  934  format,  to  have
them  easily  extractable  with burst(1).  That should do the job
for now.

Good anti-spam actions are still waiting to be implemented.


Minimalist isn't maintained anymore. I have  a  guess  why:   The
code's horrible. (Am I just too used to well written code?)  It's
less than 2000 lines of Perl, but the first half is not  modular-
ized  into  functions;  only  conditionals  over conditionals.  I
shouldn't be surprised to discover  such  an  indentation  style:
(Notice the indentation of the closing braces!)

      foreach $s (@junk) {
        if ( $s =~ s/^\@// ) {       # Expand items, starting with '@'
          if (open(IN, $s)) {
            while (<IN>) {
              chomp $_; $result[@result] = $_; }
            close IN;
           }
         }
        elsif ($s ne '') { $result[@result] = $s; }
       }

When I discover unmaintained email software, which I use,  I  al-
ways  feel  this  need to take it over and care for it. It's 2000
lines of Perl in a horrible style. I surely could do  better  ...
But  I  don't have the time for it. I simply cannot work on it. I
need to care for the projects I already have adopted.  I  already
have  problems  to  care  for both, mmh and masqmail. Hence, I'll
keep running the hacked minimalist and wait  to  get  some  round
tuits.


Maybe I should though have a look at enemies-of-carlotta.  Be  it
only to compare the coding style.



http://marmaro.de/lue/        markus schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de>