Luke Sheldrick's Blog

I often wanted to have the ability to have email addresses such as myname+somethingrandom@mydomain and it go to myname@mydomain however as far as I know, exchange is unable to support such a nice feature.

However as I earlier blogged, I now have 2 exim front ends, so I asked a quick question on a mailing list, and they gave me a few links. Seems with just two lines of code, I can get this all to work. Just by adding

local_part_suffix = +* : -*
local_part_suffix_optional

To my routers config, it does what exactly what I wanted.

If you was wondering why I wanted this, whenever I now give my email address out, I can give it out in the style of myname+sideaddress@domain and it will always come to my mailbox. However if I then start to see lots of spam to any paticular +variable, I can tell what nasty site sold my email addy.

Last week, I started working on a new mail platform. I had in place, an Exchange 2003 box at home, and a backup mail server running Exim, based in Global Switch London.

I utilised Greylisting on both, however found the linux version ten times better. So set myself a task to setup a new front end, in front of my main Exchange box. Ruled out getting rid of it totally, as I personally prefer the features of Exchange (Push mail, calanders…etc).

So I setup a virtual machine (CentOS 4.4) on one of my virtual hosts, configured exim, with greylisting, and to relay all mail to my domains, to the internal IP of my Exchange box. I also wanted to setup a test Exchange 2008 box at the same time, so anything to my development domain, would go to a different internal IP.

After a few tweaks, magically it all worked… until I started to get NDR’s  stating that mail was being delayed to my domain. A few telnet tests later, discovered that if you connected from a host with no rDNS, my mail server took 30 seconds to time out doing a reverse DNS check. Many mail servers would have timed out by this time. A quick tweak of my exim config to lower the DNS time out, from 30 seconds to 5, cured the problem.

For anyone wanting to do this, edit the exim.conf lines

rfc1413_hosts = *
rfc1413_query_timeout = 30s

to

rfc1413_hosts = *
rfc1413_query_timeout = 5s

This evening, I had just sat down to watch some tv before work, and a program had already half started (Boy A). Looked really interesting, so was gutted I had missed it, and more so that I hadn’t stuck it in the planner.

Thought I would torrent / stream it at another time. Remembered seeing an advert for 4od (Channel 4 On Demand),  so thought I would take a little look.

Not been a fan of OD services, since the launch of BBC i-Player, as I use both Vista, and Mac OS X, both not supported. However was delighted that 4OD was Vista Supported (Still not Mac, but progress). Quick install, and brilliance.

Loads of TV that I wanted to watch, and had missed out on. The film, by the time I had drove to work, was ready to either stream, or download. Can’t fault that.

Check it out: 4od 

So after buying my copy of leapard, tonight I got around to upgrading from 10.4 to 10.5 on the laptop.

After a blue screen hitch, that was fixed by a quick google, and consult with Mr Hardy, all was sorted.

Must say I am pretty impressed with the new OS by Mac. I’ve just sat and watch Pirates of the Caribbean, and still have 2:14 left on the battery, considerably more than I was getting before. w00t.

Will have to wait and see how much I get on with it, at the moment, the only bug bear is that I can’t use InsomniaX that kept my MacBook from going to sleep when I shut the lid. Hopefully they’ll sort that out soon enough.