David Gessel
Mulberry Mail is Excellent
Not too long ago I got on a plane with Thunderbird, having transitioned to IMAP, woke my laptop in flight and found my imap mail cache had gotten borked. Five useful work hours wasted. So in my searches for “Thunderbird Disconnected Problems” I found mention of this program called “Mulberry” that didn’t have these problems. I had looked at Mulberry years ago and it was cool, but fee and Eudora was then current and free so I didn’t try it out. I am so glad I found it again. Mulberry handles disconnected IMAP perfectly, has a fast powerful search, and is well-organized. I’ve had no problems and I’m using it to write this now on an 11 hour flight.
At the outset, it is clear this is the vision of a single programmer not the work of committee and as such it is quirky and has some unique solutions. I wouldn’t say it is more quirky than Eudora but at first one will definitely spend time searching for functions and consulting the somewhat thin documentation. The basics are easy enough, but some advanced features are non-obvious.
Further, Mulberry is Correct. That is it is a fairly precise implementation of just about every mail standard, including some that are still emerging. Not surprising as the author, Cyrus Daboo, has also written some of the key server-side programs that run the web, including some of the really hard bits like the SASL authentication engine I use on my server and one of the most popular IMAP servers. If something doesn’t connect it is because the other program (the server or whatnot) is making a mistake. This is great as far as it goes, but some non-RFC compliant usages have become commonplace and sticking to the RFC can cause problems. An example I found quickly was that the Message-ID: header Mulberry generates is constructed as unique-message-string@[client.dotted.quad] (something like 3499345954.0253243@[192.168.15.101]). This is correct, but the standard is to use @my.smtpserver.com, and using a non-fully qualified extension (the dotted quad, not a valid domain name). The dotted quad looks spammy to spam filters, and in particular when the client is on NATed DHCP, the private IP (192.168.etc) it looks bad. So Mulberry sourced mail might get a slightly higher SpamAssassin score (it is not a fatal test, but it can’t help) and my procmail spam filter looks for disagreement as a test so I can’t email myself notes to my own account – I have to send them to my MIT account.
Cyrus says he is going to fix this.
Which brings me to another wonderful feature of Mulberry: it has great support from the mailing list and author. You won’t go more than 24 hours without an answer to the most technical questions. And as it is in active development, any bugs are going to be fixed. Compare this to a MS product where that is not going to happen.
Mulberry’s mail interface took me a little getting used to. For example the mailbox list is organized a little differently and single clicks open new mailboxes in the next pane and the message in the pane below it, but this behavior can all be customized in the Window->Options… menu including, critically for me: do not mark previewed message as read.
Another good trick is automatically moving read messages out of the inbox. I haven’t been entirely satisfied with the sort options: the unread messages always seem to sort in the reverse order of what I want, putting the messages I need at the interface between the read and unread messages, rather than at the top or bottom. But the auto move mechanism works well for my inbox and lets me sort the inbox by date, it being all unread mail, the read mail automatically being moved to an archive.
I spent some time figuring out two wonderful features: Mulberry (along with GCalDaemon) supports off-line calendar sync with Google Calendar (YAY! I can answer email about my calendar while I’m on a plane and even schedule a meeting!) and I can sync to ScheduleWorld’s LDAP server (which syncs to my phone address book and my work Outlook address book). And since I use ScheduleWorld to sync my work Outlook calendar to Google calendar, I’ve got all my important information at hand, even in the air. I wrote up the steps to make these tricks work on the Mulberry Wiki.
Even the search function is fast – entirely tolerable though perhaps not quite real-time like Google Desktop, but then again you don’t need to open inane stupid brain dead IE to perform the search like Google Desktop forces you to.
Mulberry is great. It works really well, it is stable, it works offline (disconnected), it syncs right, it has a very good offline calendar client, IMAP support seems flawless, it has great keyboard shortcuts, and fast advanced search. It does everything I need and it is now free, open source, and available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX.
Nerds in Lucca
This past weekend there was a Comics and Games convention in Lucca. The plazas had been filled with giant tents, all packed to bursting with eager, sweaty young people with an unnatural fascination for fantasy. Some were amusing, and many people had clearly devoted a lot of their lives to their costumes, but in the end it seemed the biggest celebrity was the police Lambroghini.
It was a fun few hours walking around the tents and looking at the comics, but the best part was taking the train to Lucca from Borgo. It is only 20 minutes each way and less than $2. One walks into town through the old walls. All very picturesque and very beautiful, even when mobbed by kids in strange anime costumes.
Halloween in Borgo a Mazzano
I flew to Italy on the 31st, just in time for the big Halloween bash in Borgo. The whole town puts on the “largest Halloween celebration in Europe.” It was hard to imagine that our little town could really claim such an honor, but it seems plausible now. The town was filled with people from end to end, even late at night. There were bands in every plaza and dancing and scary costumes and fireworks below the Devil’s Bridge at midnight.
Our friend Leslie came out with Carolyn a week earlier and stayed for the party. Carolyn and she both had to leave very early the next day (Carolyn took off well before dawn to go to Sweden to do an install and I took Leslie to the Florence airport a few hours later).
The party was really enjoyable. It was very energetic and enthusiastic. It seemed everyone was having fun and people came from all over Italy to see it. We stayed out dancing until about 02:30 and walking back through the by-then less crowded streets, there were piles of trash stacked all around town. By early the next morning the whole place was clean again.
Italian Public Sculpture
It is far better than anything one finds in the states.
This well-breasted woman is one of four in Bologna.
Do Not Try To Run
You are not going to get away.
Strange weekend
We had some people over for dinner and each had their own strange brush
with law enforcement.
At the last minute we invited one of Carolyn’s friends to join us. He was
going to be an hour late or so, but planned to join us as soon as he got
his car back.
He arrived first.
One couple was coming over but we got a call from them shortly before we
expected them: they were robbed while they were out earlier in the day and
needed to figure out what was missing. In the end our friend Liisa came
over as soon as she could but her husband didn’t feel comfortable leaving
the house. Turns out it was some young kids in the neighborhood that have
been breaking into various houses in their neighborhood. They might end up
being very unhappy over their choice of targets thanks to her husband’s
connections to the OPD through his time in Iraq.
Another friend rang the door just about when he was supposed to, but
moments before his bag was stolen out of his car. He saw the house the
kids ran into and wanted to run over to get it. Knowing the gun ownership
rate in Oakland, I called the police first and they arrived in minutes and
went over with him. It turned into a huge production with various
residents covering for each other, lying, getting cuffed, police dogs…
in the end they couldn’t do anything but the OPD were really helpful and
sympathetic and professional. I was very impressed.
The last friend, the one who ended up first, he had to leave early because
he had to bail his friend out of jail in the morning.
.
EAT VULVA AT THE DEN RCC
A theme?
(The Red Carpet Club in Denver)
fixing GeoIP for awstats
https://web.archive.org/web/20101102191506/http://forum.maxmind.com:80/viewtopic.php?t=27 helped, but the real key was hardcoding the database location in geoip.pm line 63: if (! $datafile) { $datafile=”GeoIP.dat”; } to if (! $datafile) { $datafile=”/path/to/GeoIP.dat”; } .
Eliminating Spam with Procmail and SpamAssassin
For years I’ve fought spam with all sorts of techniques, some limited server side tricks in setting my postfix rules to very strict adherence and using RBLs, but ultimately settling on whitelist filtering on my Trusty Eudora client, POPping all that spam over whatever airport international dialup I happened to be on and cursing it even as it disappeared into the UBC folder for bulk deletion.
And I dreamed of the day when I would switch to IMAP and set up all those cool anti-spam server-side techniques I’d been reading about, primarily SpamAssassin. The problem with spam filtering is that it often catches your friends.
So I found this great procmail filter that whitelisted on the server side and sent confirmation requests to unlisted addresses. So I installed Procmail on my server, then SpamAssassin, and rewrote the filter below to do just what I wanted: