Multiple Recipient Delimiters in Postfix

Some time ago I enabled recipient delimiters (e.g. user+foo@host.tld) as a convenient way to know if shady web forms are contributing to my spam folder. The idea is that when House Depot requires me to have an account before I can see if they have loose screws in stock locally, I can sign up with garrison+housedepot@codefix.net instead of my usual e-mail. With recipient delimiters enabled, postfix will try to deliver any incoming mail to garrison+housedepot but when it finds no such user, it will try garrison and I get my mail. The problem arises when I discover that House Depot’s broken web form rejects any e-mail addresses with “+” in the user name as invalid. I’m already using garrison+foo style addresses elsewhere so I don’t want to change the recipient delimiter, but neither do I trust my real address to a company that can’t even create a proper web form.

Spam War Chronicles: SARE Ninjas

S.A.R.E. Ninjas are the folks over at SpamAssassin Rules Emporium who act as sort of an arms dealer in the Spam War: they publish custom rules and plugins for SpamAssassin, the Open Source world’s powerful anti-spam software. This article is about an imminent software release that promises big trouble for spammers.

Music on the Go (part 2)

The first Ogg-friendly music player I purchased was a Neuros II; this was late in 2004 and hardware support was fairly new as the Vorbis codec didn't reach 1.0 until 2002. Then, as now, the best place for information on Ogg-friendly devices was XiphWiki. I recall being quite impresssed with Neuros' willingness to open up the device specifications and embrace the Open Source community, unfortunately the device suffered from a number of design flaws that no amount of firmware hacking could ever resolve. Ultimately the combination of charging problems, a design plagued by awkwardness and bulk, and the manufacturer's shift to focus on newer devices doomed the Neuros II to my technology junk drawer.

WiFi Expansion

Summer in Peekskill has turned out to be quite nice and my wife and I have spent the last couple weeks refactoring our hardware configuration with procedures occasionally referred to as "foundation planting" and "buying porch furniture". Naturally, porch life in the Hoffman home requires adequate wifi coverage, so I got to thinking about how to extend my router's wireless signal.

Music on the Go (part one)

I have music on my mind. I'm listening to Voodoo Child (ten point bonus if you know how this relates to Doctor Who) and thinking about my next portable music player. Like most geeks, the first question I ask about any digital music device is, "does it play OGG?"

Generally superior to MP3, Ogg Vorbis is a must for any lossy digital music collection, but it's not the only feature I look for in a music player. I use four basic criteria to judge music players:

Dell Agress with Codefix

Dell didn't ask but if they had I would have told them that Ubuntu Linux is a good choice. I have generally refrained from the usual histrionics whenever something Linux-ish makes the news, but I'd would like to voice a couple remarks regarding Dell's Ubuntu announcement.

While I'm always happy to see Linux reaching a wider audience, Dell has been something of a fair weather friend to the open source crowd.

A Linux Success Story

I'm working on a marketing letter, and I'll be using one of my favorite success stories which is about Russ, owner of a small Internet service provider (ISP) providing web hosting, e-mail, and related services to his local community.

Once upon a time, I would listen to Russ complain of problems with his proprietary e-mail server, then I would suggest he let me set up a Linux server running open source software, and Russ would sigh, “Yeah, I really should...” but he could usually get his e-mail running again without too much help and everything would continue as before.