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16th October 2008
Screen Fork?

There are times when I think of forking. Mostly sanity returns very quickly, though

Still GNU Screen is one program that I use almost constantly, and it seems to work at a glacial pace.

The Debian package has a lot of open bugs against it. Some trivial, some annoying, and some with patches.

Making the program GNU/Linux only would simplify a lot of things. But then again would that be a legitimate reason to fork it?

Me? I'd just like to see some additional primitives.

More QPSMTPD

I've come up with a nice simple qpsmtpd plugin to do spamgourmet-like setup.

This means I can have email addresses:

  • steve.3.count@steve.org.uk
    • Allows only three mails to this address.
  • steve.date.20-10-2008@steve.org.uk
    • Allows only mail to be sent here prior to Oct 20th.

Plugin code will be in the usual place in the next day or two..

ObFilm: xXx

Tags: fork, gnu screen, qpsmtpd, screen, spamgourmet. | 9 comments.

Comments On This Entry

  1. [gravitar] Matt Simmons Submitted at 15:15:06 on 16 October 2008
    Hi,
    Out of curiosity, what issues do you have with screen? It's always worked well for me, but I probably don't push it too hard
  2. [author] Steve Kemp Submitted at 15:16:38 on 16 October 2008

    I don't have any glaring issues, but I miss some obviously correct changes which are either ignored by upstream, or only considered at a very very slow pace.

    For example this is enormously useful - or would be if I could rely upon it being present.

  3. [gravitar] Charles Darke Submitted at 15:44:03 on 16 October 2008
    Yes a screen fork would be good, not least of which to change the name to something which you can actually search for in google! :)
  4. [gravitar] foo@bar.com Submitted at 17:45:58 on 16 October 2008
    Uhhh, maybe just get involved upstream? I imagine the FSF would be happy to have people contributing to their software.
    http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/
  5. [gravitar] Alex Submitted at 18:50:18 on 16 October 2008
    So do the mails get delivered to steve@steve.org.uk or does this mean you end up quite a lot of different "To:" stuff to then bounce into specific mail boxes?
    If you're doing *@steve.org.uk into a mailbox what stops a random spammer going steve.500.count@steve.org.uk and using that for the next few months?
  6. [author] Steve Kemp Submitted at 20:03:30 on 16 October 2008

    Charles: I guess that the new name is the least of the issues, though even the obvious tmux name is taken by a BSD rewrite!


  7. [author] Steve Kemp Submitted at 20:06:32 on 16 October 2008

    Alex I guess you've got two separate questions there:

    1. What stops somebody from making up foo.count.600@domain.tld

    Nothing. In the same way that nothing stops anybody making up fsdfkljdslf@example.com.

    True it would be possible to stop this by having a shell command, or similar "new alias" to create the count temporary name. But I wasn't planning on doing that.

    2. How does the addressing work?

    Here spamgourmet win. They allow you to create addresses like funky.5.chicken - which in no way refer to your real address.

    My system simply strips the count/date suffix, and the number.

    So test.3.count gets delivered to test@domain.

    More complex options would require the aliases to be pre-created, and I don't want to do that.

    I think we all know wildcard handlers are spam magnets..

  8. [gravitar] Alex Submitted at 17:54:31 on 17 October 2008
    Okay, in which case.. I'm a little confused.. what advantage do I get from alex.5.count@mydomain given I always expect/want alex@mydomain to work as it's not a throwaway (single purpose) alias?
    Does qpsmtpd just refuse mail from a given mailserver (or recipient) after they have sent five to me? How long does that last before it's forgotten?
  9. [author] Steve Kemp Submitted at 18:09:04 on 17 October 2008

    The intention is that if you have a company that you don't trust, or that you know is going to spam you that you don't give them alex@example.com.

    Instead you give them a temporary address, so that they may mail you a "please activate your account" link, or similar. But very little more.

    Since the only address they'll have on file, the one you've given them, is the alex.3.count the first three messages they send will get through to you - and any more won't.

    As for the memory, that persists on your MX machine until you clear any flags. So you could reset things if you wanted.

    OK more realistically you'd give them the address forum.5.count@example.org rather than alex*, but the idea is the same.