Using git send-email with Gmail + OAUTH2, but without subscribing to cloud services

Introduction There is a widespread belief, that in order to use git send-email with Gmail, there’s a need to subscribe to Google Cloud services and obtain some credentials. Or that a two-factor authentication (2fa) is required. This is not the case, however. If Thunderbird can manage to fetch and send emails through Google’s mail servers [...]

Fetchmail and Google’s OAuth 2.0 enforcement

This post is about fetching mail. For sending emails through OAuth2-enabled SMTP servers, see this post. Introduction After a long time that Google’s smtp server occasionally refused to play ball with fetchmail, tons of Critical Alerts on “someone knowing my password” and requests to move away from “Less Secure Apps” (LSA) and other passive-aggressive behaviors, [...]

Thunderbird: Upgrade notes

Introduction These are my notes as I upgraded Thunderbird from version 3.0.7 (released September 2010) to 91.10.0 on Linux Mint 19. That’s more than a ten year’s gap, which says something about what I think about upgrading software (which was somewhat justified, given the rubbish issues that arose, as detailed below). What eventually forced me [...]

When dovecot silently stops to deliver mails

After a few days being happy with not getting spam, I started to suspect that something is completely wrong with receiving mail. As I’m using fetchmail to get mail from my own server running dovecot v2.2.13, I’m used to getting notifications when fetchmail is unhappy. But there was no such. Checking up the server’s logs, [...]

Decoding email’s quoted-printable with Perl

To make it short, the command at shell prompt is $ perl -MMIME::QuotedPrint -e ‘local $/; $x=<>; print decode_qp($x)’ < quoted.txt > unquoted.html and I needed this to extract an HTML segment of an email.

Turning off DSN on sendmail to prevent backscatter

I sent that? One morning, I got a bounce message from my own mail sendmail server, saying that it failed to deliver a message I never sent. That’s red alert. It means that someone managed to provoke my mail server to send an outbound message. It’s red alert, because my mail server effectively relays spam [...]

Microsoft’s outlook.com servers and the art of delivering mails to them

Introduction Still in 2020, it seems like Microsoft lives up to its reputation: Being arrogant, thinking that anyone in business must be a huge corporate, and in particular ending up completely ridiculous. Microsoft’s mail servers, which accept on behalf of Hotmail, MSN, Office 365, Outlook.com, or Live.com users are no exception. This also affects companies [...]

The art of setting up a sendmail server on Debian 8

But why? Fact number one: Running your own mail server is the most likely cause for messing up, and that can mean an intrusion to the server or just turning it into a public toilet for spam. Nevertheless, if mail delivery is important to you, there’s probably no way around. And I’m not talking about [...]

Gmail: How to turn off spam filter for incoming mails

Gmail is definitely the leader in the field of email services, and their spam filter is actually very good. From my own experience with setting up a mail server, I can tell that it’s not all that easy to make Gmail’s incoming mail servers even talk with you. So the larger part of spammer don’t [...]

The SPF, DKIM and DMARC trio: Making your email appear decent

Intro Whether you just want your non-Gmail personal email to get through, or you have a website that produces transactional emails (those sent by your site or web app), there’s a long fight with spam filters ahead. The war against unsolicited emails will probably go on as long as email is used, and it’s an [...]