I chose [[http://supybot.com|supybot]] for the logging — its far more advanced than my needs, but since its written in python and has excellent documentation, I stuck with it. I used [[http://pisg.sf.net|pisg]] to generate the stats. This friday’s stats can be found [[http://people.apache.org/~diwaker/for-n.html|here]]. Those interested in full details will find the complete logs in our SVN repository.

A few days before that, Ross, Addi and I sat down for a collaborative editing session using [[http://gobby.0x539.de/|Gobby]]. It was pretty cool actually — I’d never used a collaborative text editor before — these things are quite funky. Real time editing in different colors, real time IRC like chat. It was pretty nifty. And, we were [[http://article.gmane.org/gmane.text.xml.forrest.cvs/5106|quite productive]].

In other news, [[http://www.codezoo.com/|Codezoo]] //still// hasn’t updated its [[http://www.codezoo.com/pub/component/2845|Forrest page]] despite my having submitted the DOAP file several times. Please guys, I’m trying to help you out here — fix this before we lose interest! :)

I’m not sure if this is Planet Apache or Marcus’s blog. But either way, its a small issue that will probably get resolved quickly :-)

Greetings to all!

A brief introduction — I’m very new to Apache, and got involved primarily due to my interest in Apache Forrest. This blog is where I ramble now and then about technology, philosophy, movies, vim, linux, ubuntu, forrest and anything else that fancies my thought :-)

BTW, I notice that the //feed// link next to pretty much all names (including mine) on the Planet Apache home page under the Subscriptions list point back to http://planetapache.org — is this the correct behavior? Does’t seem like to me. Ideally the //name// should be a link to the home page (if any), and the //feed// should point to the feed, as it says.

A few years back, this wasn’t a problem at all. SMTP by itself didn’t have (still doesn’t) any notion of security. So you could fake any email address you want in the envelope, and SMTP would happily deliver it for you. However, with the proliferation of spam on the Internet, ISPs and SMTP servers have become very wary of faked from addresses.

What does a fake from address really mean? For most purposes, it simply means that the domain of the from address and the domain that the mail originated in don’t match up. A lot of ISPs only relay mails through their own mail servers (and block port 25 for any other mail servers). Their own mail servers frequently restrict from addresses to be the one that the ISP gave you. A large number of organizations have started using [[http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys|DomainKeys]] or [[http://spf.pobox.com/|SPF]], which makes faking a sender address even harder.

Gmail allows sending messages through their SMTP servers using your gmail account, but no matter what sender address you put in there, it gets substituted by your gmail address. So thats no good is it?

Ideally, I think there should be a decoupling between owenership and authentication. Each email address has a unique owner, multiple email addresses can have the same owner. Then SMTP should authenticate the owner, not the email address. Of course its easier said than done. I’ll think about it a bit more and write something more thought out later on.

Here’s the [[http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.text.xml.forrest.devel/14604 | official announcement]]

Oh yeah, if you haven’t noticed, for the past year (or more), my website (the static part of it) has been built by Forrest.