simonb.com: blog > articles tagged with email

When developing web sites, one of the things we often have to do is put fixes in the code to work around bugs in Internet Explorer. This is getting better with IE8 and IE7 but IE6 still has a large market share and it's the worst damn browser in the world for standards compliance®. Typically we make a lovely site, then test in IE6, bang head on desk, fix, test and repeat. Oh the joy. But all of this is nothing, nothing I tell you, compared to the travesty that is the HTML rendering in Outlook 2007. When…

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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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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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