06.25.06
Superstition
Damn. I didn’t remember Sesame Street being so hip.
Archive for June, 2006
06.24.06
Double-Pass Spam Filtering with Gmail
In my continuing battle against spam, I’ve now implemented double-pass spam filtering, using Gmail as my first line of defense and DreamHost’s SpamAssassin installation as the second. I got the idea (and most of the implementation) from MBoffin.com, and have added a page to the DreamHost Support Wiki explaining how to do it using the default setup (i.e., no custom-installed applications) on that host.
The way it works is that all incoming email on my DreamHost account is scanned for the presence of a special forwarding-only Gmail address. If the address is not found, the message is forwarded to Gmail. Gmail decides whether the message is spam, in which case it’s held in the Spam folder, or not, in which case it’s sent back to the DreamHost server. DreamHost again checks for the required address, and this time finds it, because Gmail has inserted it into the headers. Next the message goes through SpamAssassin, which assigns a score depending on how “spammy” the message looks. I’ve set SpamAssassin to quarantine anything with a score of 5.0 or greater, and to tag the subject line but pass anything with a score of 3.0-4.9.
Technically, I’m using a triple-pass filtering system, because Apple’s Mail.app has its own filtering rules. So far, however, it looks like Gmail and SpamAssassin won’t need any extra help.
If you’d like to try it yourself, note that you’ll need to dedicate a Gmail address to this purpose—everything going to that address will be forwarded to your DreamHost account, so don’t use an address you’re already using for other things. If you need a Gmail invitation, feel free to ask me for one—email nicholas at acetylene dot net.
UPDATE: It appears that Gmail is somewhat inconsistent in its use or formatting of the X-Forwarded-For: header, leading to infrequent (but annoying) infinite loops. (Actually, procmail is intelligent enough to reject the message rather than forwarding it a second time, but that means it stays in Gmail and never arrives in my IMAP inbox.) I’ve simplified the rule to avoid this problem in the future; now all procmail is looking for is the address of my forwarding-only Gmail account. As long as it finds that somewhere, it’ll send the message to my IMAP inbox.
UPDATE 2: I was wrong: Gmail wasn’t being inconsistent; DreamHost’s procmail was. Seems it sometimes thought the mail was looping when it saw its own Delivered-To: header, so I’ve edited the DreamHost wiki to include a formail pipe that removes that header before forwarding to Gmail.
06.15.06
Looking Again
As a couple of my readers already know (but most don’t), my contract with the school ends at the end of the month, and the school has chosen not to renew it. It’s understandable; they’re going through the re-accreditation process in a couple years, and would like to have a credentialed teacher in my position if possible. Kind of messes with my plans a bit, but I’m not worried about finding something new—I have two good possibilities lined up already, and will probably take some temp work to fill in any gap between permanent positions. Still, if anyone out there knows of a good job opening up in the Sacramento area next month, feel free to let me know. I’ll post any further developments here as they occur.
06.14.06
The Button I Made
 |
 |
I’m working on a project, as some of you know, that will involve such links, and I wanted the buttons to look good together. Amazon has lots of different buttons and logos, as well as code generation techniques to put iframes and banners on affiliate sites. Netflix has very little that I could find, so I made something myself.
The “Rent from” font isn’t quite the same as Amazon’s “Buy from” font, but it’s close enough, I think (I used Arial Narrow, by the way). It’s kind of hard to read in black on dark red, but I tried white and that just didn’t look right. Anyway, the Netflix logo is legible, and that’s enough to get the purpose across in context.
Feel free to use it on your own site; all I ask is that you copy it to your own server rather than linking to mine. Steal my bandwidth, and I reserve the right to replace the image with something embarrassing.
