Tarballs of Ion! — zakame’s blog

[Note: I wrote this more than three weeks ago, but due to me being lazy again (yeah right) I’m just publishing this now. Well, here goes:]

Due to a project working on (in Perl,) I’m asking the great Lazyweb for their great insight into the problem of sending outgoing mails.

It all started when I was trying to set up my own mail system on my laptop perlis. After months of doing most of my mails under GMail and finding it impressive, but not quite adequate for my needs, I decided to go back to my old desktop workflow of downloading all my mails using ESR’s fetchmail over IMAP, and using my preferred MUA (Gnus, in this case to write my replies/posts/spam and send them using an MTA.

However, since the time I’ve been checking my mails on revan, the amount of mail that I have been receiving has gone up to less than manageable proportions for my old system, so I had to revise my way of getting my email fix. Ultimately, I went on to use John Goerzen’s offlineimap to synchronize my IMAP Maildirs locally and do my mail stuff from there. No problem at the receiving front.

On the sending of emails, I ran to a slight problem. I used to use an MTA to relay my mails to a smarthost for delivery, but since things have changed a bit (new ISP that blocks port 25, for one I have to find some other means. Although I could probably configure my MTA to use (and authenticate to) a smarthost, I found that approach to be too heavy for comfort (even when using a special-purpose MTA such as masqmail.) Furthermore, I’d like to have more control on how I send my mails (like which mails using one of my email addresses should go to a particular smarthost.)

So, here is my attempt to solve my problem: a small, user-configurable mail submission agent. It small because it is written in Perl, and makes the most out of it (being a Perl user means you gotta love CPAN It’s user-configurable, involving a small INI-style file in the user’s home directory (I would prefer, however, to do away with tinkering with config-files altogether and do all configuration via some friendly interface.) It’s not much, but it works. And it’s working for the past three weeks or so now.

I call it kartero because its the Spanish-Filipino word for postman (and yes, that’s exactly what my program does. It’s not much, but you can pick it up and try it yourself. Complaints; violent reactions: you know where to send them.

Thanks to Rommel, I got infected with the FizzBuzz.

I won’t bother to repost my own Perl solutions here, but let me say for the record what intrigued me most:

it’s amusing to me that any reference to a programming problem– in this case, FizzBuzz– immediately prompts developers to feverishly begin posting solutions.
1) The whole point of the article is about WHY we have to ask people to write FizzBuzz. The mechanical part of writing and solving FizzBuzz is irrelevant.

I should also say it took me a while (more than the 2 minutes for CodingHorror, and more than 10 for Rommel) to write up a couple of solutions; I had to set up a Test::More test script first.

Yes, I cannot read.