Entries tagged 'mailing lists'

i finally got tired of the index pages on the mysql mailing lists looking like ezmlm-cgi, so i cribbed some design from the perl mailing lists and now the by-thread index pages include who participated in a thread. i didn’t steal the pagination of busy months. yet.

i need to package up more of the bits of code driving the mysql mailing lists. there are some quirks, but i like the way it all fits together.

i also need to put in the few hours it would take to make it possible to post to the lists from the web interface.

to appease my non-technical readers, i will just mention in passing that the breakfast of spam, rice, and eggs is yummy.

on to the technical gobbledygook.

i’m really disappointed by gmail’s spam handling. i listed my gmail address on my about page, so it eventually made it into some spammers list and is now getting inundated with spam. there are 1240 messages in the spam folder, and i get about five to ten obvious spam emails in the inbox every day, mostly lottery and financial transaction scams.

have i mentioned lately how much i hate systems that filter spam into a folder? just bounce the damn messages and let the sender sort it out.

i also get a bunch of spam through my apache.org address. i should figure out if there’s some way i can configure things there to not accept mail that isn’t addressed directly to me. or maybe i should just give up the address when i move on to emeritus membership.

my mail handling could be a whole lot smarter. i started using gmail because i didn’t have to worry about email systems that rejected mail from my system because it didn’t have reverse dns set up, or sometimes end up on a blacklist due to nearby hosts, or whatever. the gmail interface is not bad, but i think i want to get all my mail back into one system.

i have some vague ideas about an amazon s3-backed mail system, but no real motivation to get started on it. i’d also like to write a mail client that behaved like i want. something like a gui mutt with some gmail goodness thrown in.

enemies of carlotta is a mailing list manager in the style of ezmlm, but written in python by lars wirzenius. one problem with it is that it is written as a pretty monolithic application, as opposed to ezmlm’s series of commands that are run for a few different addresses. but there’s some interesting design decisions made. it doesn’t implement digests yet.

one of my biggest annoyances with ezmlm these days is that the digest generation is not character-encoding aware. so for a list like the mysql japanese list, the digests, particularly the plain-text one, look like garbage. this is more frustrating because i spent a fair amount of time making sure the web-based archive got the encoding issues right.

the mysql lists are set up so that both mime-encoded and plain-text digests are generated, using a dummy list and some judicious symlinks. when we took over the maxdb lists from sap, the existing lists only had a plain-text format, and the subscribers clamored for that when we only had the mime-encoded versions available.