I’m in the process of moving servers, from jagger, hosted with Bytemark to lennon, hosted with iFuse. The major advantage of iFuse is price; I’m getting a better system for less money. That, and one of my housemates works for them, so I can pester him for tech support in person.

I’m taking the opportunity to set this server up better; I’ve already improved my mail filtering, setting up dspam properly (and discovering in the process that I’d been doing Postfix filtering wrong for years). I’ve also moved my website from http://subvert.org.uk/~bma/ to http://bma.subvert.org.uk/; both addresses should work, but I suggest updating links.

I’m hoping also to get a photo gallery set up; I’ve mostly stopped updating Flickr, in part because it’s such a pain to deal with (though better than, for example, Facebook). I’m hoping to use ikiwiki for it. (On a related note, ikiwiki now has support for real comments, rather than discussion pages, so I’ve enabled them for this site.)

Update: I ended up staying with Bytemark, as long-awaited upgrades (from UserMode Linux to KVM) made them more worthwhile.

The next website to tell me that an email address with a plus-sign is invalid is going to get an extremely nasty email with a copy of RFC2822 attached.

New article (tutorial, whatever)—"How and Why to Encrypt Your Email". Feedback appreciated, from anyone who bothers to read it.

Since Seth asked:

colon zero newline asterisk space caret “list” hyphen “id” colon space less-than “home” dot “subvert” dot “org” dot “uk” greater-than newline “maildir-name” slash

Or, in machine-readable form:

:0
* ^list-id: <home.subvert.org.uk>
maildir-name/

Skippy claims that Vista Mail rocks. Hmm…

Mail messages are now stored in individual files instead of in a single database file. A transactional index database enables real-time searching and improves the stability and the reliability of the stored data.

Are those plaintext files? If so, you’ve pretty much reached the standard that Unix mailers have been at for years (your IMAP mailbox on termisoc.org, for example, is stored like that). If not, you’re hardly better off than one big database.

Account setup information is no longer stored in the registry. It is instead stored alongside the mail itself.

Wow, you mean like having a plaintext config file that can be easily modified and backed up? I can see why Microsoft are the biggest software company in the world, with innovations like that!

A Bayesian junk-mail filter.

Contacts are stored as VCards instead of in a single database file.

I can’t even be bothered to make more sarcastic comments about these last two. Think up your own along the lines of my previous comments, and apply them here.

A really cool thing it does (well i like it) Vista Mail downloads ALL your mail (from IMAP) and caches it localy, i know this sounds silly, but if your like me and using a laptop with a slow network connection, (or on a train) its usefull.

Well, I use offlineimap to do exactly that. Useful, but hardly innovative.

Now if only Outlook would start using this methord of sensable structuring, and something that would make it much cooler…. The ability to Tell Mail where to store its files then life would be so much easer, and make sense for me.

Well, I use offlineimap to do exactly that. Useful, but hardly innovative.

Wait, am I repeating myself again? Vista Mail has, apparently, finally gotten all those handy features that other mail clients have had for years. Now if they hurry, they might come up with something new and exciting…

From their registration form: “The address can contain only letters, numbers, periods (.), hyphens (-), or underscores (_).”

Bullshit. They just can’t be bothered to check for the full range of RFC2822-compliant addresss. Lazy bastards.

Okay, this is just a list of things that people do in emails that really annoy me, inspired by recent threads on the TermiSoc and [36]DC-GLUG mailing lists.

Top-posting

This one’s complained about rather a lot, so I’ll just quote:

A: Because it reverses the flow of conversation. Q: Why is top-posting bad?

Don’t do it. If your mail client (Outlook, for example) makes it easier to top-post than to bottom-post, then get a better mail client. It’s not as if there’s a shortage.

HTML

I use Mutt. Therefore, any HTML in an email is wasted on me, since it gets converted to plaintext and looks exactly like any other message.

Previously, I used Evolution, which displayed the HTML (in fact, there’s as yet no option to display plaintext instead). However, on my 19" monitor at 1600x1200, most text is rather hard to read unless I set the font slightly bigger. Except I can’t, since you sent it as HTML. So I can’t read your email without straining my eyes or leaning close to the monitor. Either way, it’s not going to make you popular, at least with me.

HTML email is often either pointless or downright unpleasant. I reserve the right to ignore HTML email.

Content-free messages

Last week, I received an email consisting of the two characters ":)" and nothing more. In ASCII, ISO-8559-1 or UTF-8, that’s two bytes.

The email, including headers (it was sent to a mailing list, so there were more than usual), and including the HTML version that many clients seem compelled to include along with the plaintext version, was 2612 bytes, meaning the actual message was less than 0.1% of the email. Why even bother?

Disclaimers

If you send an email to me, I am by definition the "intended recipient". If I’m not the intended recipient, then you accidentally addressed it to me and accidentally hit send, meaning you’re completely incompetent and shouldn’t be allowed near a computer in case you hurt yourself.

Similarly, why tell me to ignore everything in the message? Since you’re doing so in the message, you’re creating a paradox. How can I send it back to the sender and delete it from my computer if I’m to ignore the message? I hope your head explodes.

And I honestly couldn’t care less about whether or not the message has been checked for viruses, since I don’t read my email as root and don’t go opening random attachments, meaning I’m pretty safe even if by some fluke your 32-bit Windows virus can even run on a 64-bit Unix box. It’s not as if viruses that send mail are likely to use Lookout to do so, is it? No, they try connecting directly to port 25 on some random mailserver, completely bypassing the mail-scanning plug-in your mail-client is using. This means that only messages not sent by a virus will be scanned. Useful, eh?

Lack of context

Okay, so you’re replying to a message in a mailing list thread. The message was sent some days ago. Does it not occur to you that people might not remember what the original message said? Emails stay in my inbox for a day or two at most; if you’re replying after that then there’s a good chance I have no idea what the hell you’re replying to, and I doubt I’m the only one. Quote the relevant parts of the message (not the entire thing) so people know what it is that you think is a good idea.

Anyway. There’s probably more but those are the ones I can think of right now.

Boredom has led me to implement SPF on my mailserver, using this script. Seems to be working happily:

action=PREPEND Received-SPF: pass (niamhe.bmalee.eu: domain of bma@bmalee.eu designates 82.45.24.36 as permitted sender)

Or, with a fake IP (simulating someone forging an address at bmalee.eu without sending the mail from a permitted system):

action=REJECT Please see http://www.openspf.org/why.html?sender=bma%40bmalee.eu&amp;ip=82.45.24.33&amp;receiver=niamhe.bmalee.eu

I’ll set it up on Zaphod at some point.