Weblog Without Honor or Humanity

Unix is for truly masochistic. Consider my recent adventures of setting up something as trivial as e-mail forwarding. All I wanted is that e-mail delivered to my Unix account was kept locally as well as forwarded to my gmail account (reading e-mail in pine over ssh connection isn’t as fun as it sounds).

Knowing nothing I had to google for information, armed only with one keyword: sendmail. I google, I read here and there and I get to know about .forward file and procmail. So I create the setup cobbled together from several different places:

$HOME/.forward is:

“|exec /usr/bin/procmail || exit 75″

$HOME/.procmailrc is:

PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin
MAILDIR=$HOME/mail
PMDIR=$HOME/.procmail
LOGFILE=$PMDIR/log
INCLUDERC=$PMDIR/general.rc

$HOME/.procmail/general.rc is:

:0 c
*
! my-gmail-account@gmail.com

:0
*
$DEFAULT

It took me, literally, hours of reading, debugging and trying different variations of this stuff.

But that’s not everything. Before my battle was over I had to fix two other problems.

First, my sendmail uses smsrh i.e. restricted shell, for very noble security reasons. That means that it can’t see /usr/bin/procmail in .forward. The fix is simple:

cd /etc/smsrh
ln -s /usr/bin/procmail procmail

Of course, to arrive at this fix I first had to happen to figure out sendmail’s error message from bounced e-mail and google for the exact message to figure out how to fix it.

The other problem is that if I didn’t have root privileges on this box I wouldn’t be able to fix it all.

But, as Steve Jobs likes to say, there was one more thing. It turns out procmail is very picky about file permissions. For good reasons, I’m sure, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s another thing I had to figure out from log files and google for. The fix (from http://www.ii.com/internet/robots/procmail/qs/#forward):

cd $HOME
chmod go-w,a+x .
chmod go-w .procmailrc
chmod 644 .forward

And all I wanted is to have my e-mail forwarded. All it takes on Exchange-based system is a creation of server-side rule using a simple UI interface from within Outlook.

Jensent Harris gives us an UI design tip: icons are not enough. Applications should label all the icons with text.

This tip is more than just a random opinion: it comes from Microsoft’s
Office Group studies that taught them that people were not clicking on
icons in Office UI until they also labeled them.

This is one example of what Microsoft does well. I’m sure that they’re
not alone in gathering detailed statistics about the usage of their
software so that they can make inform decisions about ways to improve
the software in the future but I would think it’s very rare in software
industry. I’ve never heard about another software project gathering
such detailed statistics. If Open Office wants to battle Microsoft,
they should copy good processes that lead to designing and writing good
software and not just the end result of those processes.