Posted on

Setting up OS X Mail

Old hand Unix guys like myself are used to plain text email. OS X mail will gladly oblige me if I go to: Preferences –> Composing –> Message Format: { Plain Text }. But Apple chooses to use a proportionally spaced font: Helvetica by default. To fix this, go to: Preferences –> Fonts & Colors –> Use fixed width font for plain text messages. I think that these two should go hand in hand but Apple thinks otherwise.

Sadly, what you cannot fix is the line width. It would be nice to have the plain text message lines wrapped at the nth column but, I’ll take what I can get.

Posted on

Mutt account passwords

First, to give credit where it’s due, I started here. That said, here’s how I store and access account passwords in mutt on Linux.

## -- Passwords: encrypted by gpg --------------------------------------------------------------

source “/bin/gpg -d ~/.keychain/mutt.password.neopost.gpg 2>/dev/null |”

The source line in gpg tells mutt to decrypt a file at startup. The file .keychain/mutt… contains two mutt configuration lines:

set imap_pass = "<my_email_password>"
set smtp_pass = "<my_email_password>"

I created it as follows:

$ cat <<EOF | gpg -r <my_gpg_id> ~/.keychain/mutt.password.neopost.gpg
set imap_pass = "<my_email_password>"
set smtp_pass = "<my_email_password>"
EOF
$

Gpg knows how to decrypt this file and retrieve the plain text configuration. Note well that I used a “Here” document to create the file. This keeps mail password out of the filesystem. Simple stuff, at mutt startup the first time I use it, gpg-agent asks for my gpg key and unlocks the configuration snippet.

Posted on

Emacs use tabs rather than spaces.

Today, about the only place you should see an ascii TAB in a file is in a Makefile. In a world where memory is metered as gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of storage on fast SSDs there is absolutely no need to save space in a source code or configuration file by using a tab rather than two or four or eight spaces. Note well that I may be talking to your editor configuration and not you. But when you write code you should say what you mean and mean what you say unequivocally. I say this because I have been looking at a whitespace difference in my puppet checks for better than a month now. This is because my file has in production has tabs and my file in the puppet/git repository has spaces.

To that end, I’m linking this bit of Emacs magic for readers and my future self.

Posted on

Submission brutes

Brush aside vandals attacking my submission daemon with a little sed:


submission_brutes=$(bzcat /var/log/maillog.0.bz2 | \
cat - /var/log/maillog | \
sed -Ene '/postfix\/submission\/smtpd.*errors after AUTH/s/^.*[^0-9]+(([0-9]+\.){3}[0-9]*).*$/\1/p' | sort -u)
[[ ! -z "${submission_brutes}" ]] && pfctl -t blackhole -T add ${submission_brutes}