qmail Digest 13 May 2001 10:00:01 -0000 Issue 1363
Topics (messages 62348 through 62363):
Re: config for stand-alone box
62348 by: john gennard
62349 by: john gennard
62351 by: Charles Cazabon
Re: reason for problem found: connection reset after 1 minute
62350 by: tonix (Antonio Nati)
Re: notification of new email whenever user logs in on the shell
62352 by: Charles Cazabon
Re: HELP - newbie
62353 by: Charles Cazabon
Re: Newbies vs. arrogant experts (was: Newbie with tcpserver)
62354 by: Chris Garrigues
62358 by: Russell Nelson
badmailfrom
62355 by: audit
62356 by: Johan Almqvist
qmail and procbox
62357 by: El Chupacabra
qmail does not handle timezones properly?
62359 by: Patrick Starrenburg
62362 by: Peter van Dijk
62363 by: Frank Tegtmeyer
Resolution: Qmail and Request Tracker
62360 by: Chris Jackman
Handling high volume lists (was: Newbies vs. arrogant experts)
62361 by: Robin S. Socha
Administrivia:
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On Fri, 11 May 2001, you wrote:
> john gennard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > I've installed v.1.03 from a src.deb package onto Debian Potato.
> > There is a large volume of literature which I've spent some days
> > reading and can't find explanations for a number of points (entirely
> > due to my semi- computer literate state).
>
> Please do not take this as a flame, insult, or pointless reply, but if (by
> your own admission) you are only semi-literate in computers, what are you
> doing installing a Unix MTA?
>
Charles, I certainly do not take any form of offence from your
reply - quite the opposite, in fact, I'm grateful you have
taken the time out to respond.
A couple of years ago, after reaching 70, I got a computer and following
a frustrating few months with Windoze switched to Linux which lets me
control things when, of course, I understand what I'm doing. Now, for
good or ill, I'm 'hooked' and want to learn 'all about it' (a forlorn hope as
each time I understand some aspect, another vast vista of knowledge
yet to be acquired appears before me). In short, its become a hobby.
Sendmail seems offered on most distros, and during reading about
email (using it has not presented me with problems - I've been using
kmail), a very strong case seems to be made for qmail as an
alternative. Nowhere have I seen any advice that the inexperienced
should avoid it. Spam is starting to annoy me and so I decided to
look at fetchmail, procmail, mutt and qmail as a 'package' which
might enable me to do something about it.
Most 'advisors' on serious newsgroups seem to be highly qualified
and experienced individuals who good-naturedly greatly assist those
like me. - they do not of course have to do so. In 'this day and age'
this is unusual. At the same time, I do wonder if those brought up
in times when some degree of computer literacy is the norm can
understand how the likes of myself struggle learning 'alien'
concepts in a completely foreign language, and without the
possibility of discussing things face to face with tutors, peers and
other users. Manuals are written by persons who know their subject
and believe those reading will appreciate what they say -
this is proper and completely understandable but for us is
frustrating (I doubt a brain surgeon can even countenance that
there exist people who don't know how to stop a simple haemorrhage).
Then the 'sublime irony', when we install and use, with help, that
covered by a man page and again read the page we say 'well it's
quite clear what it meant - it's obvious'.
Didn't mean to 'go on so'. Thank you very much for your response and
the helpful information you have imparted. Replies like yours are
specific to points raised, whereas general literature tends to be
too widely based. My gratitude - but I'm still going to
try to go ahead even if eventually I decide a simpler approach is
more expedient in my circumstances - any knowledge I gain is likely
to be a 'plus'.
Regards, John.
> Perhaps you should instead use something like mutt to read mail off your ISP's
> POP3 or IMAP server, and transfer any outgoing mail to them with a relay-only
> MTA like nullmailer.
>
> > I connect to an ISP by dialling with a modem and have just two user
> > accounts. I've never really understood the concept of a FQDN and so
> > can't with confidence create a /var/qmail/control file. Hypothetically,
> > my ISP is heaven.com, I call my box eden and have users adam and
> > eve, what is my FQDN? (I log in as say garden - so outsiders email
> > me as [EMAIL PROTECTED]).
>
> You don't have an FQDN. Well, you do, but it changes everytime you connect,
> and it's something like "dialin-254-43-129-32-us-west.spurious.isp.net".
>
> > I fail to understand exactly what part alias plays in the setup. At
> > a minimum, I should create three - root, postmaster and
> > mailer-daemon, but do I need any for my user accounts and why?
>
> No, and it's a big discussion.
>
> > With the simple setup I have should I bother with the dot-forward,
> > daemontools and fastforward packages?
>
> No.
>
> > I know these are very simple questions, but could someone give
> > a simple explanation to help me along. What I would ideally like is
> > a write up for a minimal setup for the type of installation I have -
> > it seems none exists or else I can't find it.
>
> qmail is designed for well-connected hosts (read: your internet connection is
> fast and always-on). While it can be made to do what you want it to do, it
> isn't completely trivial, and probably requires more Unix system
> administration skills to install, configure, and maintain than you currently
> posess. Lurk in this list for a few months, and you may pick up enough to get
> there.
>
> Charles
> --
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Charles Cazabon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> GPL'ed software available at: http://www.qcc.sk.ca/~charlesc/software/
> Any opinions expressed are just that -- my opinions.
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
On Fri, 11 May 2001, you wrote:
> * john gennard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [010511 15:25]:
> > I connect to an ISP by dialling with a modem and have just two user
> > accounts.
>
> So you need serialmail. Get and install it. There are many hints on how
> to do this in this list's archive.
>
I hadn't heard of this - although I'm subscribed to the list, I have
not yet perused the archives I'll do so now.
> > I've never really understood the concept of a FQDN and so
> > can't with confidence create a /var/qmail/control file.
>
> Your box has a name, consisting of your domain (which you don't have)
> and its local hostname. You can register a domain for a dial-up system
> at dyndns.org or something.
>
This is something I meant to have a look at sometime, but keep
overlooking. Not sure if it will be an option for me, but it's worth
seeing what is involved
> > Hypothetically, my ISP is heaven.com, I call my box eden and have
> > users adam and eve, what is my FQDN? (I log in as say garden - so
> > outsiders email me as [EMAIL PROTECTED]).
>
> That is irrelevant. You just want your From address to be correct.
>
> > I fail to understand exactly what part alias plays in the setup. At a
> > minimum, I should create three - root, postmaster and mailer-daemon,
> > but do I need any for my user accounts and why?
>
> Aliases are email addresses without local users. Mail to root is
> internally forwarded to a user you put in ~alias/.qmail-root, for
> example.
>
> > With the simple setup I have should I bother with the dot-forward,
> > daemontools and fastforward packages?
>
> Depends on where you come from and where you want to go. dot-forward and
> fastforward should be unnecessary, but daemontools and ucspi-tcp are
> very clever.
>
> > I know these are very simple questions, but could someone give
> > a simple explanation to help me along. What I would ideally like is
> > a write up for a minimal setup for the type of installation I have -
> > it seems none exists or else I can't find it.
>
> Ummmm... Just install qmail, ucspi-tcp, daemontools and serialmail and
> follow the instructions step by set. Really. :-)
Thank you for your response - every bit of extra knowledge is
welcome. Grateful, John.
john gennard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >
> A couple of years ago, after reaching 70, I got a computer and following
> a frustrating few months with Windoze switched to Linux which lets me
> control things when, of course, I understand what I'm doing. Now, for
> good or ill, I'm 'hooked' and want to learn 'all about it' (a forlorn hope as
> each time I understand some aspect, another vast vista of knowledge
> yet to be acquired appears before me). In short, its become a hobby.
Okay, I completely understand. By the way, it's a pleasure to run into
someone who's not afraid of technology and not under 30 :). I'll see if I
can't make a few recommendations.
> Sendmail seems offered on most distros,
It seems to be mostly inertia, tradition, and the path of least resistance
that causes this.
> Nowhere have I seen any advice that the inexperienced should avoid [running
> a full MTA]
Well, that wasn't my biggest concern -- it's the fact that running a full MTA
on a dialup connection has its share of problems. For one thing, SMTP is
really designed as a 'push' protocol, and if your machine isn't connected
24/7, it can be kind of pointless. ETRN has been shoved in to try to work
around this, but it's not an elegant solution. Machines with sporadic net
connections really should get their mail through a 'pull' protocol, like POP3
or IMAP.
> Spam is starting to annoy me and so I decided to look at fetchmail,
> procmail, mutt and qmail as a 'package' which might enable me to do
> something about it.
Well, it would work. However, I think there are better combinations of
software. For sending mail, I would recommend you use Bruce Guenter's
nullmailer; it's a "dumb" relay-only MTA. Bruce has written a lot of the
commonly-used addons for qmail, and nullmailer's design is influenced heavily
by qmail's, although of course its simpler. You just plug the address of your
ISP's smarthost into a control file, set a couple of other things, and it
works. Then mutt can use nullmailer's /usr/sbin/sendmail wrapper to send
mail.
To retrieve mail, I don't recommend fetchmail -- it's too problematic,
although many of its worst design bugs are eliminated by not doing delivery by
SMTP re-injection. I would suggest you try my own replacement, getmail,
instead. As for procmail, I don't use it either, but one of getmail's users
wrote "procbox" to do basic procmail-like processing after retrieval with
getmail.
Check out http://untroubled.org/ for Bruce's software.
Charles
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Charles Cazabon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
GPL'ed software available at: http://www.qcc.sk.ca/~charlesc/software/
Any opinions expressed are just that -- my opinions.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Just my 5 ITL contribute.
Reading README file of checkpasswordnt (from tar downloaded from qmail
site), I see:
> MSNT Auth v1.1
> Squid web proxy Authentication module
> Antonino Iannella, Stellar-X Pty Ltd
> Mon Apr 10 22:47:33 CST 2000
> _____________________________________
>
> This is a simple authentication module for the Squid proxy server to
> authenticate users on an NT domain.
>
> It originates from the Samba and SMB packages by Andrew Tridgell
> and Richard Sharpe. This version is sourced from the Pike
> authentication module by William Welliver ([EMAIL PROTECTED]).
>
> Usage is simple. It accepts a username and password on standard input
> and will return OK if the username/password is valid for the domain,
> or ERR if there was some problem.
>
What I read in www.qmail.org about checkpassword is different:
>
> qmail-popup and qmail-pop3d are glued together by a program called
checkpassword.
> It's run by qmail-popup, reads the username and password handed to the
POP3 daemon,
> looks them up in /etc/passwd, verifies them, switches to the
username/home directory,
> and runs pop3d. At least that's what the standard one does. Some
alternatives are listed below.
>
If what I read it true, checkpasswordnt is not good for qmail-pop3d.
Tonino
At 11/05/2001 11/05/2001 +0200, you wrote:
>Hi there,
>
>I've posted some messages concerning this strange "pop3 connection reset
>after 1 minute". I just discovered the reason for the problem, but I still
>don't have a solution.
>
>I'm using "checkpasswordnt" for my authentication issues (so that all users
>can be authenticated with our NT PDC). I just changed this back to the
>normal checkpassword program and tried again with an appropriate account.
>Now it works. No connection reset, nothing. So checkpasswordnt seems to make
>problems.
>
>But, as I understand, checkpassword is only used to authenticate the
>connection in the first place. After that it's not accessed again? There
>seems to be some kind of timeout after one minute, but where?
>
>This is the ps aux output while running a pop3 session:
>
>root 6176 0.0 0.2 1224 344 pts/0 S 11:43 0:00
>/var/qmail/bin/qmail-popup wetzel-office.com /bin/checkpasswordnt
>/var/qmail/bin/qmail-pop3d Maildir
>jhassler 6177 0.0 0.3 1236 396 pts/0 S 11:43 0:00
>/var/qmail/bin/qmail-pop3d Maildir
>
>
>One thing to mention: I certainly don't like this NT authentication stuff,
>but in this environment its needed at the moment (can't change it).
>
>Sorry for not mentioning checkpasswordnt in the first place, but I thought
>this would be the last place the problem could occur.
>
>I tried several things. tcpdump output is not very helpful. After the
>initial authentication packets there is a "NBT Session Keepalive" packet
>after 20 seconds. After this packet there is no other traffic to or from the
>NT server. I thought there would be something after exactly 60 seconds, but
>there is nothing. I'm also confused about this Keepalive packet, because the
>session should end after the first authentication transfers, shouldn't it?
>
>Strange, again: I use this "Mrs. Brisby" version of qmail-smtpd together
>with checkpasswordnt to implement "SMTP AUTH". This works without any
>problems. The same packets are travelling through the cable, there is also
>this Keepalive packet, but the connection is not reset after 60 seconds.
>
>So there seems to be something about checkpasswordnt qmail-pop3d or
>qmail-popup don't like. Maybe an Anti-M$-check :-)
>
>If anyone on this list is also using checkpasswordnt and doesn't have this
>problem then the NT server is the "evil box". That's nothing new, indeed,
>but this would be off-topic for this list.
>
>I'll further try finding a solution, maybe someone of you has a clue where
>the problem might be.
>
>Some day... I'll throw these NT things out. Certainly.
>
>
>Thanks again for your help, I really appreciate it.
>Jens
alexus <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> first if i'll put it in /etc/profile will it work for all users?
If you're using bash, /etc/bashrc is more appropriate. /etc/profile works
with most other shells that I know of.
> and another question how do i notify user when e-mail arriving while he's on
> shell?
You'll have to check the manual for your shell for this. I just run my Python
checker script whenever I want to see if I've got mail. At around a thousand
messages a day, it would be pointless to have my shell notify me every time a
message came in :).
Charles
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Charles Cazabon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
GPL'ed software available at: http://www.qcc.sk.ca/~charlesc/software/
Any opinions expressed are just that -- my opinions.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Pavel Sorejs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I Using qmail with MySQL and trying to send mail. If i send mail then i
> don't receive that user doesn't exist but the mail isnt't delivered to his
> mailbox. What can be wrong ??
Look in your logs. qmail logs information about the eventual disposition of
_every_ message. If you're not receiving bounces/double-bounces, you've
configured something incorrectly.
Charles
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Charles Cazabon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
GPL'ed software available at: http://www.qcc.sk.ca/~charlesc/software/
Any opinions expressed are just that -- my opinions.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Well said in both these messages. I really hope that some of the
self-appointed experts on this list take your example of civil behavior.
I've been on this list now since late 1996 and in recent times, it's become
almost intolerable with all the flamage. Somehow on other lists people manage
to co-exist with newbies without having to extract a pound of flesh with every
question. I suspect that if this list had been this rude in 1996, I would
have stuck with sendmail.
As it is, I consider unsubscribing several times a week (and it's not because
of the newbies).
Chris
> From: Russell Nelson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Fri, 11 May 2001 23:56:55 -0400 (EDT)
>
> Robin S. Socha writes:
> > * Paulo Jan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [010510 11:00]:
> > > Considering the guy's name, perhaps English isn't his primary language
> > > and he isn't fluent at all with it, which would also explain why he
> > > wasn't able to express himself politely enough when rejecting the
> > > "offer" from that consultant, and had to resort to a
> > > basic-and-apparently-rude-sounding phrase like "I was asking for free
> > > help". Did that thought cross your mind?
> >
> > Not for second. I'm German. I don't think.
>
> Please forgive Robin. English isn't his primary language, and he
> sometimes uses rude words and phrases that I'm sure he would never,
> ever say in his native German.
> From: Russell Nelson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Sat, 12 May 2001 00:02:39 -0400 (EDT)
>
> Dave Sill writes:
> > Second, the offer of commercial support made to Pablo was sent
> > privately, not to list. Pablo's reposting it publicly is at least as
> > rude as trolling the list for clients.
>
> The best way to troll the list for clients is to answer people's
> questions.
>
> > Answering FAQ's is "nice", but it's tiresome and contributes to
> > lowering the signal/noise ratio on the list and it encourages other
> > newbies to ask their FAQ's.
>
> Flaming them about it, though, produces triple the traffic:
> 1) The newbie's mail
> 2) The flamer's mail, and
> 3) The backlash against Robin.
>
> > Ignoring FAQ's is the easiest and safest approach. It encourages the
> > newbie to search the web, list archives, etc. and doesn't reward
> > newbies by answering their question. It keeps the signal/noise ratio
> > high, and it keeps the civility and morale high.
>
> Probably. But it demands a certain amount of Teutonic self-control.
--
Chris Garrigues http://www.DeepEddy.Com/~cwg/
virCIO http://www.virCIO.Com
4314 Avenue C
Austin, TX 78751-3709 +1 512 374 0500
My email address is an experiment in SPAM elimination. For an
explanation of what we're doing, see http://www.DeepEddy.Com/tms.html
Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft,
but they could get fired for relying on Microsoft.
PGP signature
Chris Garrigues writes:
> As it is, I consider unsubscribing several times a week (and it's not because
> of the newbies).
I send qmail list traffic into its own mailbox, and read it once a
day. It's kind of handy, because I can see the questions which don't
get answered, and sometimes I answer them if I feel so led.
--
-russ nelson will be speaking at http://www.osdn.com/conferences/handhelds/
Crynwr sells support for free software | PGPok | Mailing lists should not set
521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315 268 1925 voice | Reply-To: back to the list!
Potsdam, NY 13676-3213 | +1 315 268 9201 FAX | http://russnelson.com/rt.html
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Greetings,
I was wondering if I can put just a domain in the
/var/qmail/control/badmailfrom file
Thanks
audit
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* audit <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [010512 19:39]:
> I was wondering if I can put just a domain in the
> /var/qmail/control/badmailfrom file
Yes. You have to start it with an @.
@yahoo.com
will block all mail where the envelope sender address is
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Note that you are blocking envelope sender addresses,
not sending hosts.
-Johan
--
Johan Almqvist
http://www.almqvist.net/johan/qmail/
PGP signature
Hi,
I use qmail with maildirs format, and I would like to use procbox
(together with getmail) to filter my messages.
My question is: can I use procbox with maildirs format ?
Thanks.
--
------
El Chupacabra
Linux User No.: 187826
e-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
------
Remember, there is always a Chupacabra
around the corner.
------
Dear All
I have a query regarding the way qmail (?incorrectly?) handles time zones. I
have done various tests on this, the relevant portion of header of one test
email below. Essentially I sent a mail out from a client on my internal
network to qmail on my gateway machine, which forwarded to external web
based email service which has an autoforward to send mail to my network
e-mail address.
I sent the mail from the client at 19:22 GMT +0200 (western Europe summer
time) it arrived back to me about a minute later and displays on my client
MUA as being received at **23:23** hours, i.e. four hours in the future! Of
course you know the next thing I am going to say... before I installed qmail
I have never seen or had this problem. The client PC clock said 17:22
(+0200) correct time, the Linux box said 17:22 and is setup correctly with
TZ = GMT +0200. What's even funnier is when I send another email out from
the same client (at 18:00 hours +0200) to two different external mail
accounts I have one which is auto forwarded to my Linux box and qmail
[smtpd] and one which is picked up from an ISP POP mailbox (not through
qmail). Both emails arrive in the same timeframe, the one picked up from the
ISP POP mailbox shows a sent time of 18:00 the other delivered via qmail
shows a sent time of 22:00! The MUA stamps the message with the correct
Date: field value. So I have the same email in my inbox with times four
hours apart! and the qmail processed one four hours in the future.
I have already read previous (heated) discussions on this topic on the list
archive but could not discern a clear answer apart from some people saying
qmail works as designed - why? It seems to be the only mail server that does
so. Why does qmail use -0000 when the PC it is running on is setup as GMT
+0200? It clearly is causing a problem. Is there any configuration option
which can be called to have qmail respect the time zone of the computer it
is running on? Where and how would this be called for both qmail [POST] and
SMTP daemons?
Thanks in advance
Patrick Starrenburg
=======================================================================
Received: (qmail 1269 invoked from network); 11 May 2001 21:23:00 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO rmx452-mta.mail.com) (165.251.48.46)
by xxx.homeip.net with SMTP; 11 May 2001 21:23:00 -0000
Received: from smv635-ec.mail.com (smv635-ec.mail.com [165.251.32.19])
by rmx452-mta.mail.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id NAA02057
for <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Fri, 11 May 2001 13:22:46 -0400 (EDT)
Received: from spf1.us4.outblaze.com (205-158-62-23.outblaze.com
[205.158.62.23] (may be forged))
by smv635-ec.mail.com (8.9.3/8.9.1SMV070400) with ESMTP id NAA04867
for <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> sent by <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Fri, 11 May 2001 13:22:46
-0400 (EDT)
Received: from xxx.homeip.net by spf1.us4.outblaze.com (8.11.0/8.11.0) with
SMTP id f4BHMiv03491
for <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Fri, 11 May 2001 17:22:44 GMT
Received: (qmail 1266 invoked from network); 11 May 2001 21:22:45 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO starr02) (192.168.1.10)
by xxx.homeip.net with SMTP; 11 May 2001 21:22:45 -0000
Reply-To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
From: "xxx" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Test sent 19:22 GMT +0200
Date: Fri, 11 May 2001 19:22:30 +0200
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
On Sun, May 13, 2001 at 08:19:27AM +0200, Patrick Starrenburg wrote:
[snip]
> I have already read previous (heated) discussions on this topic on the list
> archive but could not discern a clear answer apart from some people saying
> qmail works as designed - why? It seems to be the only mail server that does
> so. Why does qmail use -0000 when the PC it is running on is setup as GMT
> +0200? It clearly is causing a problem. Is there any configuration option
> which can be called to have qmail respect the time zone of the computer it
> is running on? Where and how would this be called for both qmail [POST] and
> SMTP daemons?
qmail uses -0000 because it is the receiving MUA's task to display the
date in the format the user desires. If your MUA is unable to do so,
complain to the MUA author.
qmail uses -0000 because only if all headers use the same timezone,
reliable debugging is possible.
qmail uses -0000 because timezone support adds a lot of code bloat
that makes no sense in an MTA. Your sending client should add a date
header.
Greetz, Peter.
"Patrick Starrenburg" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> people saying qmail works as designed - why?
Because it makes debugging easier.
> It seems to be the only mail server that does so.
So what? Is that a problem?
> Received: (qmail 1266 invoked from network); 11 May 2001 21:22:45 -0000
> Received: from unknown (HELO starr02) (192.168.1.10)
> by xxx.homeip.net with SMTP; 11 May 2001 21:22:45 -0000
> Date: Fri, 11 May 2001 19:22:30 +0200
I have never seen this behaviour. I suspect there is something wrong
with your Linux setup:
> problem. The client PC clock said 17:22 (+0200) correct time, the
> Linux box said 17:22 and is setup correctly with TZ = GMT
> +0200.
If it says 17:22, it is *not* configured to GMT +0200. Try to set
Timezone CET. It should say 19:22 then. This two hour offset
corresponds to the four hour offset of qmail.
Regards, Frank
On Fri, 11 May 2001, Charles Cazabon wrote:
> Chris Jackman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> [...]
> > We noticed that there is no delivery 2: success message, nor is there
> > ever for any other email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [...]
> > If we kill all the alias processes first, and then kill the rt process (78014
> > above) that is doing "perl -T /var/rt/bin/rtmux.pl rt-mailgate tickets
> > correspond", we see this in the qmail logs:
> >
> > 2001-05-06 05:03:26.769179500 delivery 2: deferral: qmail-local_crashed./
>
> It would seem at first glance that your Perl script never finishes; it blocks
> on something, or goes into an endless loop.
Resolution:
One of my associates had rebuilt perl with threads. That's what was
causing this problem. We rebuilt perl w/o threads, and it works w/o a
problem.
cj
* Russell Nelson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [010512 20:57]:
> Chris Garrigues writes:
>> As it is, I consider unsubscribing several times a week (and it's
>> not because of the newbies).
> I send qmail list traffic into its own mailbox, and read it once a
> day. It's kind of handy, because I can see the questions which don't
> get answered, and sometimes I answer them if I feel so led.
There are several ways of dealing with high volume lists (which in the
Microsoft Outlook (Express) age equals "high amount of lusers messing with
stuff they should never be exposed to"). I've been getting between 500 and
2500 messages (mail and news) per day for years, and I've found that there
is only one tool that does the job effectively: Gnus http://gnus.org/.·
Why?
====
There are several problems with high volume lists. In no particular
order:
· lusers not reading the minimum amount of documentation;
· broken software (why did you not cut the "(was:" (which should have been
"(Was:" in the first place) from your quote?). Examples:
- removing References: headers in order to, well, what? break threads
(a concept alien to the morons in Redmond, but extremely useful - if
you have a good newsreader, you know what I'm talking about);
- encouraging *wrong* behaviour like "message on top, full quote
below" (eh, bandwidth is unlimited, right?), excessive signatures
(yes, 4 lines *is* enough, no, I will *never* ring you up or visit
you) without sigdashes (yes, that's ^-- $, and yes, it *does* make
sense, because various tools can cut your sig from replies or
(even better) make it invisible if it sucks), sending HTML (what
is this - the web?) or VCards (as I said, I will *not* phone or
visit you, and no, I'm not interested in your birthday, favourite
sexual deviation or daughter's name either (if she's willing and
blonde, you can send me some bikini shots, though);
· off topic threads (like this one);
· idiots and trolls (usually mutually interchangable, but stupid trolls
are even more annoying (greetings to Michael T. Babcock while we're
at it (remember kids: no lame flame without at least one ad hominem
attack)));
· dupes (like, I am on this list and only a complete retard would send
me a Cc: (which makes approx. 31 retards per month which, in return,
makes me wonder when the prices for anti-personnel ammo will finally
drop)).
Solutions:
==========
· Encourage people who are obviously lost to adapt a behaviour fitting
for a technical environment: tell them to read and follow
http://learn.to/edit_messgages/ and the links therein;
· Tell them why using Outlook and similar "programs" is not only bad
for themselves but also destroys threads, which means archives, which
means shared knowledge databases;
· Use software that lives up to the challenge of a Microsoft-luser
infested environment: Gnus.
- Gnus introduces the concept of adaptive scoring. Killfiles are for
lusers, real men score: each article is assigned a value for "From:,
Subject:, References:, quote/text ratio, etc. and the summary for
the group the article is filtered into is sorted according to these
values: Gods first, lusers last.
- Gnus automagically de-moronizes messages (while reading and in
replies):
* convert RE: AW: SE: to Re:;
* cut (Was:);
* wrap long lines;
* nuke HTML, VCards etc.;
* remove spurious blank lines;
* ...
- Gnus works with IMAP (including mail splitting) and Maildir (courtesy
of Paul Jarc's nnmaildir.el - *great* work!). Ummm... are we on topic,
yet? Good.
- Gnus lets you merge mailing lists into thematically similar groups.
- Gnus lets you read mail like news (including expiry).
Possible additional weapons include procmail[1] and the BBDB (for
marking posters known to you).
Anyway, I sometimes wonder what makes people think they deserve help
if they don't invest a minimum amount of time and diligence into
writing their mails to technical mailing lists. The qmail list is a
particularly sad example with a group of *extremely* competent and
helpful (I've /never/ had to wait for more than 6h for an answer to
my problems (*all* of which were solved)) people being swamped by a
tidal wave of morons asking FAQs, not knowing their way around the
Internet or using orthography and grammar in a way that indicates a
grasp of the English language that will effectively bar them from a
deeper understanding of qmail, anyway.
Yes, people like me who are fairly new to qmail and had rather have these
people answer meaningful (i.e. "I can learn something from this" rather than
"wow, those are either extremely nice or masochistic people") questions get
very frustrated over this.
But it's much easier to whine and groan, Chris, instead of taking some
action, isn't it? After all, your post was brought to us via softmail
written by the same k3wl D00d3 who invented the Internet (no, not Al
"Treehugger" Gore, but the Great Chairman Gill Bates himself), so it
*has* to be okay, eh? Not.
Footnotes:
[1] The following recipe nukes all mail with a text/quote ratio of 1:2
and more (weighted scoring *rules*):
:0 Bh
* 20^1 ^>
* -10^1 ^[^>]
/dev/null
--
Robin S. Socha <http://my.gnus.org/users/robin/>
http://my.gnus.org/ - To boldly frobnicate what no newbie has grokked before.
