It’s been rather a while since I last worked on a userscript, but there’s been a problem I’ve been trying to solve for some time.
I want to have my GMail in order from oldest to newest. While you can do this for all messages, you can’t do it within a single page.
The Sender Policy Framework is one of those things that’s really powerful and useful to help prevent phishing and email spam, but can be a royal pain to work with. Specifically, SPF is a series of DNS TXT records1 with a specific format that can be looked up by any email service to verify that an email was sent by a server that should be authorized to send email on your behalf. For example
"v=spf1 ip4:192.0.2.0/24 ip4:198.51.100.123 a -all"
v=spf1 - tells the client this is an SPF record and should always start the record{key}[:{value}]? - one of many different key/value pairs that can define the recordip4 key species an IPv4 address range that can send emails on your behalf (the value can be optional)a above is another special case where if the sender domain ([email protected] would be example.com) resolves via a DNS A record to the server that sent the email, it’s allows-all is a fallthrough case meaning ‘fail all that didn’t match a previous caseThere are a number of other cases, but we’ll get to the other interesting ones in a bit.
For a number of years now, I’ve been writing down my ‘observations’. Essentially, it’s a semi-structured set of text files that I keep in Dropbox. One for each day, in a folder by month. I record interesting people I see, things I did worth doing, and things my children did which were adorable.
After a while, I started wanting to look back, so first, I wrote a relatively simple script that would go back through my archives and send me everything I did 1/2/3/4/etc years ago. That worked well enough, but it ended up generating a lot of emails to go through some days. So the second generation is a server that can format those pages and display them as a nice webpage.
The most interesting part perhaps was dealing with the tarballs that I keep the archives in (they’re plain text, so they compress very well). I wanted to keep them compressed, so I had to decompress them in memory on the fly.
One problem that has come up a time or two is dealing with email-based domain validation (specifically in this case for the issuance of TLS certificates) on domains that aren’t actually configured to receive email. Yes, in a perfect world, it would be easier to switch to DNS-based validation (since we have to have control of the DNS for the domain, we need it later), but let’s just assume that’s not an option. So, how do we ‘catch’ the activation email so we can prove we can receive email on that domain?
When you send a text message to a Gmail email address (at least from an iPhone using AT&T), you get something like this:
It’s vaguely annoying to have to click through every single time just to see what the message is, especially when various extensions (such as uMatrix) break overlay rendering or when you have multiple attachments.
Much better would be to just display the plaintext attachments inline:
Last week, I was presented with a fairly interesting challenge: add DKIM (via OpenDKIM) support to our mail servers (running Postfix). Given that I’ve never actually worked on a mail server before, it sounded fun. 😄