Category: Problems

Workarounds, patches and unsolved software bugs.

launch for Mac OS X

I’m in the habit of keeping multiple profiles under firefox. It means I can have a profile for FF2 (with old plugins that haven’t been ported to FF3), a profile for development with FF3, and one for general browsing with FF3.

Despite their usefulness, profiles seem to be discouraged. The profile manager isn’t shown by default. You have to start the firefox binary with -P to get it up.

Having multiple profiles is great, but under Mac OS X it’s not easy to use them simultaneously. Trying to re-launch an application just activates the currently open instance. Aside from the (wasteful) hack of duplicating the .app directory, how do you open the same application twice under Mac OS X?

The answer is launch. It’s in fink too.

launch -m -a Firefox

Apparently Quicksilver had a “Launch a copy” action that did something similar, but I can’t find it in the current version.

google SPF bounces

Google’s gmail MX is doing the right thing by enforcing SPF rules, but the wrong thing by sending bounces (backscatter) to the address that those SPF rules indicate is forged.

I got the following message from the google mailer daemon (addresses obscured, of course, but xxx@xxxxxxxx.com does list google’s mail domains in its MX DNS records):
Continue reading “google SPF bounces”

Apple Mail filters suck

While I would normally use gnus/gmane for mailing lists, cygwin-apps‘s gmane gateway is read-only, so sending a message necessitates an ezmlm subscription. Unlike mailman, ezmlm doesn’t allow you to be subscribed in a “don’t send me mail” state.

So I end up with 38 emails of noise in my inbox overnight, which would be fine, except that interspersed with these are personal emails which I overlook.

One of the nifty features of M2 was its automatic mailboxes for mailing lists. IIRC thunderbird had similar “virtual folders”, and Apple Mail has a “Smart Mailbox” feature that is essentially stored filters. The only problem is, the Apple smartness is limited to a few predefined fields, and the “Mailing-List” and “List-Id” headers aren’t among them. However, you *can* add custom headers for “Rules”, but this requires a genuine folder (e.g. an IMAP folder), and by that point it’s a better policy to add the rule server-side.

So, here’s the maildrop ~/.mailfilter rule:

if (/^List-Id:.*/)
{
        exception {
                to $DEFAULT/.Lists/
        }
}