This is a quick overview of the parts of an SMTP session that are relevant to SPF and mail server setup. Just a sample SMTP session For a starter, this is what an ESMTP session between two mail servers talking on port 25 can look like (shamelessly copied from this post, which also shows how [...]
Since around the beginning of December 2017, fetchmail stopped retrieving mails form Gmail servers silently, without issuing any kind of error message. Only when starting fetchmail in the foreground, I got fetchmail: Server certificate verification error: unable to get local issuer certificate fetchmail: This means that the root signing certificate (issued for /C=US/O=Google Trust Services/CN=Google [...]
Mail with gmail.com as From address vanishing It started really bad: Someone asked me why he hasn’t received an answer from me in two weeks, and I had answered his mail the same day I got his. It turned out that Gmail had thrown mail into the black hole without any warning. Probably the updated [...]
So the situation is like this: An email I attempted to send got rejected by the recipient’s mail server because my ISP (Netvision) has a poor spam reputation. And it so happens that I have a shell account (with root, possibly) on a server with an excellent reputation. So how do I use this advantage? [...]
Introduction I’ve been annoyed for quite a while by Thunderbird’s strong inclination towards HTML mail. To the extent that if I don’t really, really verify that a mail goes out in plain text, it’s probably going to slip out in HTML. This is bad in particular when sending mails to Linux-related mailing lists. They don’t [...]
Just set up your mail server? Congratulations! Now you should test it. In particular, check if it relays mails to other servers and if the response time is reasonable. Here’s a script for doing the testing. Just edit the arguments to send_mail() to match your setting. #!/usr/bin/perl use warnings; use strict; use Net::SMTP; send_mail(’127.0.0.1′, # [...]
Introduction These are my own notes as I set up an OpenVZ VPS server, based upon CentOS 5.6 to function as a web and mailing list server. A $36/year 128 MB RAM machine was good enough for this. Since there’s some criticism about the hosting provider, and it looks like they’re OK after all, I’m [...]
On Thunderbird 3.0.7, this little extra file turned the folder names with new mail red and bold: (the “chrome” directory needs to be created) $ cat ~/.thunderbird/sdf2k45i.default/chrome/userChrome.css @namespace url(“http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul”); /* set default namespace to XUL */ /* Setting the color of folders containing new messages to red */ treechildren::-moz-tree-cell-text(folderNameCol, newMessages-true) { font-weight: bold; color: red [...]
This should have been obvious: Have a “new mail” icon in the system tray when new mail is fetched by Thunderbird on a FC12 Linux machine. I ended up writing my own script. My starting point was the “Gnome Integration” add-on. Not that I liked that it forced me to have another notification popup on [...]