Posts Tagged ‘email’

I hadn’t seen this tool before so I figured I would share. Swaks is the swiss army knife SMTP according to the homepage.

I’ve covered testing email from the command line before but this tool sure makes it easier.

swaks --to nick@tld --from nick@tld
*** MX Routing not available: requires Net::DNS.  Using localhost as mail server
=== Trying localhost:25...
=== Connected to localhost.
<-  220 cmdln-laptop ESMTP Exim 4.69 Thu, 16 Apr 2009 12:23:24 -0500
 -> EHLO cmdln-laptop
<-  250-cmdln-laptop Hello localhost [127.0.0.1]
<-  250-SIZE 52428800
<-  250-PIPELINING
<-  250 HELP
 -> MAIL FROM:<nick@tld>
<-  250 OK
 -> RCPT TO:<nick@tld>
<-  250 Accepted
 -> DATA
<-  354 Enter message, ending with "." on a line by itself
 -> Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2009 12:23:24 -0500
 -> To: nick@tld
 -> From: nick@tld
 -> Subject: test Thu, 16 Apr 2009 12:23:24 -0500
 -> X-Mailer: swaks v20061116.0 jetmore.org/john/code/#swaks
 ->
 -> This is a test mailing
 ->
 -> .
<-  250 OK id=1LuVJ6-0007ge-Jf
 -> QUIT
<-  221 cmdln-laptop closing connection
=== Connection closed with remote host.

Some projects have production code that runs off of a git cloned repository. There may be a case in which you want to notify others when that clone pulls. It is a pretty easy feat with gits post-merge hook. The post-merge hook will run after a merge (think git pull). All you have to do it create a project/.git/hooks/post-merge shell script and chmod +x it. Next time you pull successfully that script will run. Here is an example.

#!/bin/bash
TEMPLOG=$(mktemp)
echo "Sending email notification of update"
git log --reverse --no-merges --stat @{1}.. < $TEMPLOG
sendEmail -u "Production code update notification" -t recipient@domain.com < $TEMPLOG
rm $TEMPLOG

As you by now well know I try to mostly live at the console (well multiple x consoles). Mutt is my mail client of choice. I’ve tried Thunderbird, Kmail, Evolution, Sylpheed, and pine. For whatever reason I feel most comfortable with mutt. I also use IMAP for both my personal and work accounts. Mutt was originally designed to deal with local mail and while it does a very good job with IMAP I don’t like how it handles multiple accounts.
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Being able to send email manually seems to be a bit of a lost art. It is extremely handy to know how to use telnet to send email for testing procmail filters, and any other part of your mail system. It can also be fun to spoof email to a friend or co-worker. Read on for a quick run down. (more…)

The company I work for (Absorbent Ink) that makes corporate gifts and other personalized products. has started sending out a newsletter. Part of this newsletter process for me has been tuning one of our exim based mail servers.
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Our exim mail server has been getting a bit flakey in the past several weeks. As far as I could tell it was being caused by junk mail getting caught in the queue. After a bit of research I believe I have found a combination of solutions that seems to do the trick (at least for me)
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