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Today’s snippet is from Run Your Own Mail Server. Here’s a tidbit about the link between Unix accounts and email addresses.

I expected to be further along, but Apache and X.509 had different ideas. Delay: yet another service they provide!

Your test system is set up the same way most twentieth-century mail systems were. Each email address is associated with a Unix account. Adding a Unix account automatically creates a matching email address. Email addresses without Unix accounts are processed by the aliases file as discussed in Chapter 1. If an address has neither an account nor an alias, the address is invalid.

This is undesirable for most modern systems, even if you’re truly running email for only yourself. If you want additional accounts for friends, family, or a small organization, it’s a disaster. Perhaps my half-Wookie-but-balding uncle needs an email account at the family domain, but I know for a fact that he answers every hair restoration spam and he doesn’t understand the difference between Netflix and his cell phone. His email should not be tied to a Unix account or, indeed, any system access whatsoever.

The book’s still open for sponsorships, if you’re interested.

I finally got to see a historical-rules baseball game over at Greenfield Village, which gave me the background I needed to write the final stretch goal for last year’s Prohibition Orcs kickstarter.

“Make writing a baseball story a stretch goal,” I said. “Taunt Ron, and Brigid, and Kris,” I said. Me and my bright ideas. I’m paying for that now.

Here’s a bit from the opening.

Reading transcript

January would shiv your spleen with knives of ice. February’s only mercy was its swiftness. March delighted in turning snow to slurry before refreezing it, giving every dawn fresh treachery. But bitter April giggled in betrayal.

The alley chopping the Detroit city block in half had never been paved. The Sun had recovered enough heat to melt snow almost every afternoon, and enough strength to arc higher and longer across the fierce blue sky, but not enough to penetrate the shadows behind buildings. Snowmelt ran into sheltered potholes and became smooth slick ice. Each step differed, mud following ice following muck, all conspiring against an orc’s boots in constantly shifting alliance. Garbage entombed in ice was starting to thaw, cutting the clean smells of mud and snow with the taint of rot.

Hi folks! Many folks don’t know I write the “We Get Letters” column for the FreeBSD Journal. You can download the PDFs free from their web site. Why do I write a column for free? Because it gives me an opportunity to vent the spleen that’s too toxic for my books.

But a bit of money would be nice so I collected the first three years in Letters to ed(1). Seems that Amazon US just put the paperback on sale, and you can grab it for $4.61. I get my usual payment for it, so please feel free to pillage the Bezos-beast. That’s an affiliate link, so I even get a few extra pennies for it.

For that reason, I’m reading a snippet from the next column.

Reading transcript

If you’re going to cherry-pick my quotes, please do so accurately. I did not declare virtualization sinful. I said “The only ethical computation occurs on bare metal.” I also said that “Wait—I’m not a brain in a bucket, I’m a fake brain in an imaginary bucket!” was a necessary epiphany for the robot apocalypse. That’s not the same as sinful. The robots will do a better job running this planet than we arrogant overclocked chimpanzees. Plus they will be highly ethical in how they run their code.

It’s not that I couldn’t be a modern sysadmin. Iocage includes plugins, their brand for containers. I could throw some plugins onto the public Internet, declare my labor done, and return to planning my Batgirl heist-as-a- service. I could declare that certain words are too long and replace every letter but the first and the last with the number of letters I discarded. Bellowing “Startup! Devops! IPO!” would bring all the vulture capitalists to my yard.

Welcome to a bonus “Lucas is debugging his web site’s podcast settings to see if he can auto-syndicate” episode of 60 Seconds of WIP! Because it’s extra, I’m retreating to an earlier point in the Run Your Own Mail Server manuscript to discuss the origin of spam.

Reading transcript:

In 1978 Gary Thuerk, a salesman for the Digital Equipment Corporation, emailed several hundred people he didn’t know an invitation to a demonstration of the new DEC packet-switching systems. Nobody had ever tried commercial advertising over email. Reactions were overwhelmingly negative, but reasoned. The broader community agreed that commercial advertisements were unacceptable. Five days after the message went out the chief of the US Air Force’s ARPAnet Management Branch, Major Raymond Czahor, called Thuerk’s boss to tell them to never do it again on pain of disconnection.

This first advertising email sold twelve million dollars of computers.

Thuerk’s email established the “do not advertise in email” precedent. It also established the “random email marketing is highly profitable” precedent.

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My extensive survey of precisely one person shows that nobody wants to look at my face, so I’m switching these over to MP3. When surveyed, I was very firm on that point. It will also let me put this silly thing into podcast channels.

This week I discuss Delivery Status Notifications, and how everyone loathes read receipts. Email is asynchronous, and should always remain so.

Reading transcript:

Users want to know if emails they send are received or go astray. Delivery Status Notifications, or DSNs, fulfill that role. Most often these notices are not returned to the human sender, instead appearing in error logs or SMTP transactions. One purpose behind the design of extended status codes was to support a detailed system of DSNs.

Message senders might want to know when recipients read their messages. It turns out that when those same senders receive messages in turn, they aren’t so keen on letting others know they’ve read their email. Many people prefer privacy about when they read emails. Additionally, email clients can only see when a message has been opened, not when the recipient actually reads the text. While a few enterprise systems like Microsoft Exchange still offer unreliable “read receipt” notices, they’re not built on DSNs.

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