simonb.com: blog > articles from October, 2007

Google Apps is a marv thing. And free too. Since looping our email through Google we’ve been getting much less spam. But I’ve noticed the following quirks:

1. smtp.gmail.com is clever about the From field. The user I authenticate as is the one that shows up in the From field when the message is received. So even if I set the From field to be info@..., if I login as simonb@… The receiver sees email From simonb@… Once you’ve authenticated most services let you set the From field to whatever you like.

2. Mail from me to…

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Here’s a page explaining how to make the sasl_passwd.db file used by Postfix when SMTP relaying mail.

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We like to print invoices in a variety of currencies. There’s no setting in QuickBooks for this - it takes the system default… Well, most of the time. If you have your Region (International PreferencePane, System Preferences) set to one where the little yellow triangle shows up with the message about Unicode and WorldScript, the currency symbol is ignored. So, say I have China selected for no other reason than say I’m in China and billing in Yuan QuickBooks will use the $ (USD) symbol. I have to set the Region to ‘United States’ (not the Unicode one,…

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I’m re-installing the latest in a line of sick iMacs after it has returned to us with new hard disk. I keep getting “perl crashed” messages appearing in the console when doing a software update and when trying to print with cups. The perl crash log tells us why:

This is fixed by copying over a version of libperl.dylib which does have the symbol ‘atfork’ (available on every other Mac in the office) But the question is why does this happen. I got the iMac back…

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It’s often useful to have a local SMTP server one can throw messages at without passwords and authentication. For example, if you’re doing a quick hack or sending messages from a program like Apple’s Mail. It’s even more useful if your local SMTP server can contact your regular SMTP server to send the messages into the greater interweb.

Macs come with postfix installed which can do just that - but without any graphical means of configuration I doubt most people know it even exists. It is a fully functional mail server though and can be used…

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