Tag: email

Deliverability versus delivery

I copy from Word to the Wise:

  • Delivery is what happens to a particular email. It is what ISPs are most concerned about.
  • Deliverability is the delivery potential of a particular email. It is what marketers, commercial senders and ESPs are concerned about. Deliverability is more than just “can this email be delivered”, it is the sum total of factors that play into email marketing: relevance, structure, content, and reputation.

Check your Gmail

Interesting to observe how sometimes the tech jargon evolves: For years I would tell (or SMS text) friends and colleagues “check your email” whenever there was need to check their email faster than they normally do. Lately I find myself replacing the phrase with “check your gmail”.


You have new gmail.

Yahoo! FBL

I signed us up with the Yahoo! Complaint Feedback Loop. It comes very handy when you need to document stuff like:

  1. How a single user can harm the delivery of everybody sending to Yahoo! Mail through your servers, and
  2. How to provide independent (i.e. not yours) evidence to said user that his (possibly infected) machine is the cause of the problem

Re: EIMAI ENA SUBJECT

Αυτός είναι ο ευρηματικός τίτλος / Subject που έβαλε σε ένα email ένας συνάδελφος, απαντώντας σε email άλλου συναδέλφου που δεν είχε βάλει Subject στο email του.

Bottom line: Βάλτε Subject (Θέμα) στα email που αποστέλλετε.

Διαφορετικά το να περιμένετε να διαβαστούν (την ώρα που θέλετε και όχι κάποτε στο χρόνο) είναι κάτι που εγγυημένα δεν θα συμβεί.

Qm – The Quick Mailer

Ever wanted a /bin/mail equivalent for Windows just to send a quick email? Enter Qm. Qm is extremely small (~20KB) and fast, integrates easily with your web browser and Windows Explorer and best of all, it requires no installation! Therefore it can be combined with any portable applications that you choose to carry around on a USB stick.

Update 2010/04/15: Unfortunately, according to the web site Qm is no longer being maintained.

[http://pyric.org/qm/]

Using Net::IMAP::Simple to move mailboxes around

In the past I have described using Net::POP3 (combined with tmail from UW-IMAP and a Perl script) to move inboxes from an old (and proprietary) mail server to a new one. However, if your users keep folders like Sent, Drafts and Trash on the mail server, you have to move these also. And this is where Net::IMAP::Simple enters the picture:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Net::IMAP::Simple;
use Sys::Syslog;

$host = shift or die;
$user = shift or die;
$pass = shift or die;

openlog("imapcat-tmail", 'pid', 'mail') or die;
syslog('info', 'fetching mail for user %s', $user);
closelog();

# When debugging experiment only on myself
## if ($user ne "yiorgos") { exit 0; }

# Folders that we migrate.  CAUTION:  The Trash folder has to be the last in
# line!  That is because $imap->quit expunges the last open folder.  We want 
# this to be Trash and no other.

# For the time being, INBOX is being carried over by pop3cat-tmail.
## push @folder_list, "INBOX";
push @folder_list, "Sent";
push @folder_list, "Drafts";
push @folder_list, "Trash";

$imap = new Net::IMAP::Simple($host) or die;
$imap->login($user, $pass) or die;

while ($folder = shift(@folder_list)) {
        $nm = $imap->select($folder);
        next unless $nm;
        for ($i = 1; $i < = $nm; $i++) {
                $msg = $imap->get($i);
                open T, "| /storage/bin/tmail2 -I $folder $user";
                print T for @{$msg};
                close T;
                $imap->delete($i);
        }
        $imap->expunge_mailbox($folder);
}

$imap->quit;

## print "Bye.\n";
exit 0;

Some notes:

  1. tmail2 is a local version of tmail with a local quota function implemented in tquota.c. It also allows for the -I switch to be used by ordinary users.
  2. This script should be used with caution. When using it to move mailboxes around, keep in mind that all messages will be marked as new when moved.
  3. I must find time to do the same thing forking a version of mailutil that accepts the user password via a command line switch instead of the terminal.

Disabling SquirrelMail folders

We are not an IMAP shop, but we use SquirrelMail to provide webmail access to our users. Therefore we need a way to restrict folder access via SquirrelMail. I came up with this trick some day in 2005:

  1. Edit <SquirrelMail installation directory>/functions/page_header.php and comment out the line: 
    displayInternalLink ('src/folders.php', _("Folders"));

    This removes “Folders” from the menu, but still, they are directly available.

  2. Assuming bash as the root shell: 
    # cd <SquirrelMail installation directory>/src
# for i in folders*.php
do
     cp /dev/null $i
done

and you are done.

[original page]

O AliasFile=null: and Lenny’s sendmailconfig

As is described in the bat book, when you set:

O AliasFile=null:

no aliases will ever be found. However, if you put in your sendmail.mc:

define(`ALIAS_FILE’, `null:’)dnl

and the run sendmailconfig on a Debian Lenny, update_db will complain because it cannot handle the null: declaration. If you are bothered by this warning message, the solution is simple. Do not declare null: and instead:

# cp /dev/null /etc/mail/aliases
# newaliases