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Dirty. Dangerous. Your kind of people.

16 October 2008 21:50

Screen Fork?

There are times when I think of forking. Mostly sanity returns very quickly, though

Still GNU Screen is one program that I use almost constantly, and it seems to work at a glacial pace.

The Debian package has a lot of open bugs against it. Some trivial, some annoying, and some with patches.

Making the program GNU/Linux only would simplify a lot of things. But then again would that be a legitimate reason to fork it?

Me? I'd just like to see some additional primitives.

More QPSMTPD

I've come up with a nice simple qpsmtpd plugin to do spamgourmet-like setup.

This means I can have email addresses:

Plugin code will be in the usual place in the next day or two..

ObFilm: xXx

| 9 comments

 

Comments on this entry

icon Matt Simmons at 15:15 on 16 October 2008
Hi,
Out of curiosity, what issues do you have with screen? It's always worked well for me, but I probably don't push it too hard
icon Steve Kemp at 15:16 on 16 October 2008

I don't have any glaring issues, but I miss some obviously correct changes which are either ignored by upstream, or only considered at a very very slow pace.

For example this is enormously useful - or would be if I could rely upon it being present.

icon Charles Darke at 15:44 on 16 October 2008
Yes a screen fork would be good, not least of which to change the name to something which you can actually search for in google! :)
icon [email protected] at 17:45 on 16 October 2008
Uhhh, maybe just get involved upstream? I imagine the FSF would be happy to have people contributing to their software.
http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/
icon Alex at 18:50 on 16 October 2008
So do the mails get delivered to [email protected] or does this mean you end up quite a lot of different "To:" stuff to then bounce into specific mail boxes?
If you're doing *@steve.org.uk into a mailbox what stops a random spammer going [email protected] and using that for the next few months?
icon Steve Kemp at 20:03 on 16 October 2008

Charles: I guess that the new name is the least of the issues, though even the obvious tmux name is taken by a BSD rewrite!


icon Steve Kemp at 20:06 on 16 October 2008

Alex I guess you've got two separate questions there:

1. What stops somebody from making up [email protected]

Nothing. In the same way that nothing stops anybody making up [email protected].

True it would be possible to stop this by having a shell command, or similar "new alias" to create the count temporary name. But I wasn't planning on doing that.

2. How does the addressing work?

Here spamgourmet win. They allow you to create addresses like funky.5.chicken - which in no way refer to your real address.

My system simply strips the count/date suffix, and the number.

So test.3.count gets delivered to test@domain.

More complex options would require the aliases to be pre-created, and I don't want to do that.

I think we all know wildcard handlers are spam magnets..

icon Alex at 17:54 on 17 October 2008
Okay, in which case.. I'm a little confused.. what advantage do I get from alex.5.count@mydomain given I always expect/want alex@mydomain to work as it's not a throwaway (single purpose) alias?
Does qpsmtpd just refuse mail from a given mailserver (or recipient) after they have sent five to me? How long does that last before it's forgotten?
icon Steve Kemp at 18:09 on 17 October 2008

The intention is that if you have a company that you don't trust, or that you know is going to spam you that you don't give them [email protected].

Instead you give them a temporary address, so that they may mail you a "please activate your account" link, or similar. But very little more.

Since the only address they'll have on file, the one you've given them, is the alex.3.count the first three messages they send will get through to you - and any more won't.

As for the memory, that persists on your MX machine until you clear any flags. So you could reset things if you wanted.

OK more realistically you'd give them the address [email protected] rather than alex*, but the idea is the same.