Category Archives: Programming

Material related to computer programming.

Ignoring emails with old dates

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I was reading about Postfix’s cleanup facility which supports header_checks which can be specified in a regexp: table. And it inspired me to come up with this header_filter_map file:

/^Date: .* [JFMASOND][aepuco][nbrynlgptvc] 1/ REJECT
/^Date: .* [JFMASOND][aepuco][nbrynlgptvc] 200/ REJECT
/^Date: .* [JFMASOND][aepuco][nbrynlgptvc] 2010/ REJECT
/^Date: .* [JFMASOND][aepuco][nbrynlgptvc] 2011/ REJECT
/^Date: .* Jan 2012/ REJECT
/^Date: .* Feb 2011/ REJECT
/^Date: .* Mar 2011/ REJECT
/^Date: .* Apr 2011/ REJECT
/^Date: .* May 2011/ REJECT
/^Date: .* Jun 2011/ REJECT
/^Date: .* Jul 2011/ REJECT
/^Date: .* Aug 2011/ REJECT
/^Date: .* Sep 2011/ REJECT
/^Date: .* Oct 2011/ REJECT
/^Date: .* Nov 2011/ REJECT
/^Date: .* Dec 2011/ REJECT

Which I applied in Postfix by adding the following line to /etc/postfix/main.cf:

header_checks = regexp:/etc/postfix/header_filter_map

It remains to be seen if what I’ve done will work, and at the moment this is a bit of a pain because I have to manually update the header_filter_map file every month, but the general idea is that if the regexp matches a date too far in the past then the message is rejected. Hopefully then those spammers who have messages turning up in my history will be gone.

Making directories executable and files read and writeable

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I had a problem with my rsync backups. The problem was that the first time I ran it everything worked fine. The second time it ran (and all subsequent times) I got back the phone book of error messages, because the first time I’d run rsync it had copied in a whole heap of read-only files, and then when I ran it again it wasn’t able to overwrite those read-only files. At least I think that was what was happening. So I added the following to my backup script:

  find . -type d -exec chmod u+x {} \;
  if [ "$?" -ne "0" ]; then
    echo "Cannot chmod directories in '$PWD'.";
    exit 1;
  fi
  find . -type f -exec chmod u+rw {} \;
  if [ "$?" -ne "0" ]; then
    echo "Cannot chmod files in '$PWD'.";
    exit 1;
  fi

This code runs after rsync and processes the files and directories that have been synchronised. That is, it processes the copy of the data, not the data I copied from.

For the copy of the data I want to make sure that the owner of the files can read and write them and that the owner of the directories can execute them. So that’s what the above code does.