Right now, my stress levels are up, i’m pretty agitated and could easily have ended up answering to the police if by any chance I had in my possession a firearm of sorts…

Returning now from dinner with my wife, I was driving my wifes very small Daewoo Matiz.

It’s small, in fact it’s tiny.

BUT that is no need for people to automatically assume that the driver of the car is some frail old lady who will happily slow right down and pull over onto the nearest place to let whomever it is driving up their rear end overtake or undertake to complete what seems to be a mission to prevent imminent Armageddon !

Within the distance of 2 miles along dual carriageways, I was turning right around a roundabout and on the opposite side to my entry was a transit van who was coming fast and REALLY wanted to avoid coming to a full stop at all costs, so they just kept coming and must have missed my rear end by a fraction before overtaking and flying past.

2 minutes later we were taking the slip road off a dual carriageway onto a roundabout, again to turn right, to have someone right up my ass on the slipway, On the roundabout, even though I was indicating they decided they MUST be in front of the small insignificant Daewoo so undertook me right before my exit. That kind of driving makes me sick, and not wanting to sound old, but is indeed why their are so many accidents. And that is why I would have loved to do something put the asshole back in their place.. If not a weapon to fire into the air, then at least some blue flashing lights to put on the roof in time of need, although how convincing would a Matiz be at being an undercover cop. Hmmm

What makes my blood boil is the fact I have never encountered these idiots on the road when I’ve been driving my past vehicles, BMW, Pajero, Vectra and others all much large that the Matiz so it leads me to think that people have a general view that they see the small car and immediately assume the driver will see them behind and kindly pull over to let them past..

Grrrrr

Today I decided to install Postgrey on my mail server to help reduce the mass influx of crap I get in my mailbox on a daily basis. I’m not the type of person to have only one email address, I feel the need to use a catch all as I despise the thought of losing emails. And yes there are several thousand items in my inbox I haven’t brought myself to removing.

Anyway I’ve had it running a couple of hours now and it looks to be pretty efficient in its job and its FAR easier to setup than spamassassin etc.

What is it ?

In a nutshell, Postgrey rejects incoming emails. Yes that sounds drastic but a legitimate mail server will resend the message where as the mailservers spammers use tend to send out messages in such bulk they want to get the job over and done with as quickly as possible and don’t care if they miss a few recipients. Thats the idea anyway.
On with the setup ..

Firstly I am using postfix on a ubuntu 6.06 based server & assume all instructions are executed as sudo.

1. Install with apt-get

apt-get install postgrey

2. Edit the postfix configuration so it will work with postgrey. I use nano as an editor.

nano /etc/postfix/main.cf

Find the line – smtpd_recipient_restrictions =

Add the following lines, you may already have the first, I did.

reject_unauth_destination
check_policy_service inet:127.0.0.1:60000

3. Alter postfix settings (Optional)

By default, postfix will delay an incoming message for 300s, I think 5 minutes is a bit steep so you can change this, although this may increase the chances of receiving spam. I changed mine to 1 minute.

nano /etc/default/postgrey

Find the line POSTGREY_OPTS=”–inet=127.0.0.1:60000 –delay=300″ and change 300 to 60 so you end up with POSTGREY_OPTS=”–inet=127.0.0.1:60000 –delay=60″

Next you may wish to specify certain email addresses or domains that you wish postgrey to ignore as you trust them. These configurations are in the whitelist file.

nano /etc/postgrey/whitelist_clients

If you trust every address from hotmail (EXAMPLE ONLY !) you can add @hotmail.com on its own line in this file.

4. Restart Everything

/etc/init.d/postgrey restart
postfix reload


Thats it. You can monitor your mail log using tail /var/log/mail.log -f whilst sending an email to yourself from hotmail for example, and you should see the mail being rejected to make sure its working.

To enable the auto login feature in Windows XP do the following:

1. Click Start | Run | Enter “control userpasswords2″ (without quotes)
2. Uncheck ‘Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer
3. Click Apply – you will now be prompted for the username and password of the user you wish to automatically login as.

Thats it, just 3 easy steps. Be aware of the additional security risk involved.