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This is Not a Brain Surgery
Nov. 3rd, 2007
06:54 pm - GMail as spam filter, using IMAP
One of non-obvious implications of Gmail offering IMAP interface, is that now you can easily access from outside your SPAM folder. It might sound like not such a big deal, but it opens access to Gmail spam filtering technology, which seems to be very good.
One obvious use is to use Gmail account as honey pot, and train your local spam filter using corpus of spam, caught by Gmail. I can see a cron task, fetching new spam from Gmail via IMAP and training spamassassin with it via 'sa-learn' command.
Another use would be to build a plugin for spamassassin, which sends a copy of each new message to gmail account with SMTP, when waits for it to appear either in INBOX or in SPAM folder. Thus, one could use Gmail as a spam filter.
Oct. 19th, 2007
11:22 am - Apple Mail and Broken URLs
I am using Apple mail and love it. Except many people complained to me repeatedly that sometimes when I send long URLs they break into several lines and they could not click on them. Today I finally decided to investigate what's goind on.
Apple Mail sends plain text messages with the following Content-Type headers:
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=US-ASCII;
delsp=yes;
format=flowed
This is perfectly legal, per RFC-3676. It does break long lines, but in a manner, that other mail client which undertand this format could reconstruct them back. For example if another Apple Mail is used to read the message, it looks perfectly OK:
Unfortunately, other popular clients do not understand this, as of today. Gmail:
Outlook 2003:
In examples above, I also tried to enclose the long URL in angle brackets, as recommended by some sources. This format is defined in RFC 2396, Appledix E: "Recommendations for Delimiting URI in Context". As you can see, this did not help either.
It looks like that as of right now there is no sure way to put long URLs in messages send by Apple Mail without a risk of them being broken down, when displayed by popular mail clients. Common workardound is to use services like TinyURL to map them to shorter URLs.
Mar. 19th, 2006
08:56 pm - outsourcing your email
I always run mail servers for personal email address. My email is just something too important to outsource to somebody else. More and more sites are using your email address as your identification and even more sites use email for authentication purposes (e.g. password recovery).
I have GMail address which I give to web sites which need to send me something just once. Recently I have given it to support service and was waiting for email from them regarding technical issue with their software. It never came. After I some time I called them again and asked to send it again. Nada. After some time I figured out that GMail might be the problem. And indeed, when I gave them my usual mail address, the message has promptly arrived.
To my surprise, Gmail just rejects messages with executables in attachments, even if they are inside ZIP archives. I sent test message to myself and it bounced with the following error code: "reason: 552 5.7.0 Illegal Attachment". Mind you, it is not because it was infected by virus. It is just google quietly decided for me that I do not need to receive this kind of information. Thank you very much!