July 2003 Archives

    I know it has been forever since I last wrote about working on auth-smtp for Oliver's qmail howto (it is still Oliver's considering he wrote the original ;)), but life has kept me busy beyond anything I could have ever imagined. I am still nowhere nearer to being a programmer than I was a year ago, so I have to desperately rely on other people's work and knowledge to get things with my email server to work properly. In the mean-time, I have come across a number howto's relating to auth-smtp. While I haven't tested any of it myself, I think if I publish the list I am working through, perhaps someone who has more time than me can come up with the installation instructions. I am making a huge move of my equipment in a few weeks (moving to a new location - new house, new infrastructure and most importantly - a backup generator!) and I expect at that time to test a new qmail server which includes the auth-smtp routine. There are apparently two main ways of going about installing/configuring auth-smpt. The most important issue for those of you using the qmail-vpopmail combination is that you realize that users must be authenticated using vchkpw and not checkpasswd. Here are some of the links I have been looking at (REMEMBER: this is for people who have a good concept of how to hack with *nix servers - not for the novice):
- qmail-smtpd-auth (the main link I will likely use to revise the howto)
- Interazioni: Qmail / vpopmail page
- Re: qmail-smtpd-auth
- EnderUNIX Software Development Team
Hopefully some of these links will help. Please, pretty please, comment if they do and if you have a simple list of directions that go along with the layout of the howto that Oliver originally wrote.

One of my biggest irritants (caused by others, not me) are emails that are grammatic and etiquette nightmares. Just yesterday, I typed an email to a company asking if they could find a part that is not usually in their catalogue (they say "write if we don't have what you are looking for"). So I wrote the following email to the sales department:

And this is the response I received that sent the nerves on my neck off:

That was it. Not, Dear Steve, Thank you for inquiring, blah, blah, blah.. Simply, NO in all caps. That is one of the rudest replies I have ever received. I don't care if the person was swamped, I don't care if the person was irritated that I was asking for something they didn't have and couldn't get. I took the time to write an email, making a formal request, in a formal fashion. Their reply was nothing short of rude. I didn't need a long-winded reply. I wanted a reply that addressed me, my question and answered it. This is the type of junk that makes me hate email. People think that just because I cannot see who they are, that they can act like a 6 year old who doesn't know better.
I will not do business with this website in the future - of course, that is the only recourse I have. But, if the salesperson has responded to others who feel the same way I do about email etiquette, he has lost more than one customer. Think twice before you throw all letter etiquette out the window - you just may have an effect that will lose you business, create a false impression, etc. Email is no different than communicating via telephone, fax or formal letter. People are impressed or taken back by the way you conduct yourself.

Since moving the website to MovableType and opening the comments section of each article, there have been a good number of comments posted under the qmail articles. I wanted to openly say thanks to all of those who have posted comments! I do not have the time I wish I had to put into testing different services that I run on FreeBSD, but with the help of others, the documents will stay up to date. Please write me directly if you have questions related to making changes to the articles themselves. Otherwise, I see all of the comments made and again, thank you!