Up to Main Index Up to Journal for January, 2014 JOURNAL FOR MONDAY 27TH JANUARY, 2014 ______________________________________________________________________________ SUBJECT: Havoc & Mayhem DATE: Mon 27 Jan 22:12:29 GMT 2014 Havoc & Mayhem. Sounds like two heavies come to do some damage doesn't it? It may as well have been, guess I asked for it though... Over the Christmas period I said to my self 'I really need to sort out my email server'. When you run your own email server things are very archaic, complex and fragile. It never starts off that way and you tell yourself you'll keep a good tight hold and not let things get out of hand. It's like cables - you leave them neat and tidy in coils and bundles but you know the next time you see them they will be a tangled rat's nest. I didn't get around to sorting out the email server. So when a server died[1] it had to be the one running the email server. Like it or not I was now forced to sort out email and other services. I use email a lot. I get RSS feeds by email, status reports, current dynamic ISP IP updates, notifications, CRON job reports, reminders via calendar and anything else I can think of. For me email is a workflow. I even have a really simple and crude todo script: #!/bin/bash if [ "$#" -gt "0" ] then body="$*" else body=`cat /dev/stdin` fi title=$body if [ "${#title}" -gt "40" ] then title=${title:0:40} title=${title% *} title="$title..." fi echo -n "$body" | par -w78 | mail -s "TODO: $title" diddymus Typical usage would be: todo Need to write a journal article about server failure. First 40 characters go into the email title and complete text is in the body. You can also feed it input on stdin for the same effect. You can also reply to yourself with updates to a todo if it's long running :) Making heavy - and remote - usage of email means it has to be handled efficiently. In my case I use Mutt, procmail, fetchmail, w3m, clamav and adhoc scripts. The email also has to be text. If it hasn't got a text/plain part it goes straight to spam unless pre-filtered - some companies only send HTML email and that gets fed through w3m and converted to text automatically[2]. I do not want all of my internal email going out to an ISP just to come back to me after they have possibly scanned, stored, copied, targeted advertising and whatever else they do to it. Needless to say it's taken a while to get everything settled again. There was a WolfMUD Wednesday, it just wasn't very productive - distracted by 'stuff' e.g. servers - so I had nothing much to write home about :( Didn't think I'd be writing an entry about email though! -- Diddymus [1] See previous journal entry: A sad day 21.html [2] I hate it when people running mailing lists email me and say 'why aren't you reading any of our emails!?' I do, I just don't download your tracking images or whatever you are using ;) Up to Main Index Up to Journal for January, 2014