Category computers

[Crossposted to and .]

So, I need a suggestion…

See, I normally use a number of different email addresses to handle things like mailing lists, LJ, ebay, online ordering, etc. This works out great, as Mail.app (the Apple mail client I use) does a good job with multiple accounts.

Currently I use POP3 at home set to download the mail, and delete it 5 days later. When away from home I check mail with Squirrelmail, which uses IMAP. This setup allows me to access my last week of email remotely, with everything being available and archived at home.

I also will send email from these accounts, especially the admin one, my personal one, the lists one, and the ordering one.

I would like to switch everything around so I have a single IMAP account which I log into with both Squirrelmail and Mail.app. Inbound email will get forwarded to the IMAP account, then filtered into folders based on each account / mailing list / mail type / spam / whatever. This part is easy. Procmail seems to make this trivial.

Here’s where I’m running into a problem… From time to time I will need to send email using an account other than the main IMAP one.

Does anyone know of an easy way to do this? The only way I’ve had to do this in the past is to use Eudora and set up an account with only the outgoing address and SMTP server set. I don’t believe you can do this under Mail.app nor Thunderbird. So… Any other ideas?

Does anyone who reads this have a preference for a web-based BIND administration tool? I’m kinda sick of editing zone files by hand.

I hope someone here can help me out with this…

I’ve been reading through Apple TN2118: Kernel Core Dumps and it seems pretty straight forward. There is one thing I’m not quite getting, though. I can’t seem to find a way to make a machine panic and then dump core to the local disk. It only seems possible to dump to a remote machine running ‘macosxkdump’, not the local disk.

And, well, since I’ve only got one Mac at home, and macosxkdump hasn’t yet been ported to any other OSS platforms (an OpenBSD port would be stellar right about now), I’m kinda sunk.

Has anyone else done this, or come up with a way to get dumps to go to a local disk?

UPDATE: It appears that kdumpd from the network_cmds part of OpenDarwin is all that one needs to handle this. I’ve found postings online which say it’s trivial to port, but I don’t have the skill to do it. :( Would anyone else be up to this task?

Has anyone who reads my friends list ever worked with any sort of SSL (or other type) of cryptography accelerator? I’ve been thinking about setting up one to accelerate SSL in my webserver. It seems to be possible to obtain a few fairly cheap via eBay when one uses some inventive searching.

Have you found them to be useful? Did it really speed things up? I’m hoping to use this under FreeBSD…

Hmm. So today I installed SpamAssassin 3.0. Things went good, except in the middle of everything an errant find command b0rked my vpopmail install. (Who would have thought that find . -delete -name “bayes*” would delete everything in and beneth the current directory, while find . -name “bayes*” -delete would only recursively delete all files matching ‘bayes*’.)

Anyway, vpopmail is reinstalled, SpamAssassin is doing it’s thing, etc. Except for one problem. I don’t get any spam. At all. I get messages that are flagged as not being spam, but I never ever get any flagged as spam. I’m really not sure what’s going on… SpamAssassin isn’t capable of deleting messages, and I’ve got nothing in place to ensure that the messages go away. And messages that are flagged as not being spam come through. So, I’m not sure what’s up.

One thought is that spam counts happen to be way down today (this is a distinct possibility) and that all the spam I am getting is the silly no body / no subject / no date mail, which the MTA is doing away with.

I guess the only thing to do is go home, reset the junkmail counters in Mail.app, and see if they increase over night. If I don’t get *any* spam, I’ll have to look further. Every message that I’ve expected to receive has gotten through… I just don’t have any test spam.

[UPDATE]

I’d forgotten I left this window open… In the mean time, I sent something that was apt to be flagged as spam, but it was legit. Now to figure out what’s going on…

Okay, now this is one of the most useful things I’ve installed in a long time. Google has introduced Google Desktop Search, and boy does it work well. It’s installed and picking through my email and my machine, and the searching is just great. Outlook search is notoriously faulty, taking a long time to pick through mail, being keyboard (and not context) based, etc.

Well, this tool sits there, indexes your whole machine, and offers searches on files, contents of files, email, chats, everything. It’s *exactly* what I’ve been wanting for quite some time. You know how it’s always been easier to search the internet than your local machine… Well, now searching your local machine is just as easy. This makes me really, really happy.