fred avolio's musings

I am being sarcastic, you know? Only the computer illiterate will be surprised that the boarding passes you print out on your home printer can be faked. I don’t expect members of Congress to be computer or technology experts, but even if their eyes and brains don’t tell them this, don’t any of them have smart, computer-savvy aids with a clue?

One of many news items about this is at Boarding Pass Hacker Under Fire.

In a more recent post, Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) repented of calling for Soghoian’s arrest, but still sugested bad judgement. Dr. Avi Rubin also weighed in, “Even if he has a legitimate point, it shows a real lapse in judgement”

I suppose. Still, what’s the difference between what I print out on my printer when I “check in,” to a flight using an airline’s web site and Soghoian’s? Right, one is real. But, still… how does the TSA agent know that?

Right. He or she doesn’t.

I’ve been carrying around this pointer in my Inbox since August. It is a great read (and it is a satire). http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS8124627492.html.

I—like a lot of you—was getting lots of “buy this hot stock” spam. The latest change I made to my Postfix installation is to add a check against the Spamhaus Block List. The addition to main.cf is under smtpd_client_restrictions, which now looks like this:

smtpd_client_restrictions =
check_client_access hash:/etc/postfix/accessi
reject_rbl_client sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org

Previous articles and blogs:

• NetSec Letter #27, Spam Control
• My Current Spam Barrier , and
• My Most Current Spam Barrier.

It seems to be working well.

Well, Spamhause has been in the news. This will give you all you need to know in case you’ve missed it.

As of a few weeks ago, I was still having the problem I mentioned in Still Love and Hate Mail. I had found that if I remembered to Go Offline, then Go Online again, all was well. If not, the Mail client and the IMAP server got confused about what my Inbox looked like. Clearly, the mailbox state wasn’t being updated until I disconnected. I religiously read the Apple discussion groups (for example, this thread). And found the solution.

As I posted in the above-mentioned thread

RE: IMAP deleted mail won’t stay deleted…
Posted: Sep 12, 2006 9:39 AM

> The following is an example of such a thread, and it
> contains a more extensive discussion of what the
> issue really is and why manually taking the account
> offline/online might work:
>
> http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=586858


I looked at this before, but I looked at it again and here is what I did. This may be something you can try. I am trying it. So far, so good.

You need to change your INBOX to .mbx format. (See http://www.washington.edu/imap/IMAP-FAQs/index.html#4.5 wherein we read,

If you create an mbx-format INBOX, by creating “#driver.mbx/INBOX” (note that “INBOX” must be all uppercase), then subsequent access to INBOX by any c-client based application will use the mbx-format INBOX. Any mail delivered to the traditional format mailbox in the spool directory (e.g. /var/spool/mail/$USER) will automatically be copied into the mbx-format INBOX and the spool directory copy removed.

Okay, cool How to create the INBOX. Conntect to your IMAP server using a telnet client and then issue the commands needed to create it. I saved my Inbox contents first, but this actually should not touch the spoolfile mailbox (On a UNIX system, this is something like /var/mail/fred for me and is in UNIX mailbox format.)

So, in terminal I did this (this is exactly what I typed except I typed in my real incomingmailserver name and my real password):

telnet incomingmailserver 143
a001 login fred mypassword
a001 create #driver.mbx/INBOX
a001 logout


See http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2060.txt for IMAP commands.

Seems to be working fine. (It created INBOX in ~fred on my server, by the way.)

Fred

It is still working exactly as it is supposed to and I am completely happy with Mail.