mail to a CNAME domain

A while ago, I learned that the smtp protocol specifies that you can not have a mx record that points at a CNAME record.  And I also learned that you can not have a MX record on a domain that is a CNAME record.

But it also appears that you can't send message to an email address in a domain that is a CNAME record.  When I set up mailman, I created a CNAME host record for something like list.domain.com.  When I sent email to the list address, it appears that the sending smtp server converts the email address to the domain that the CNAME record point to.  So for example:

list    CNAME  domain.com.

emails to address@list.domain.com got changed to address@domain.com.

When I changed the list.domain.com from a CNAME record to a A record and added a mx record for list.domain.com, the email worked correctly.

I am a statistic

Nvu

I saw this post on MacSlash about Nvu.  Nvu is a WYSIWYG web development tool based on the Mozilla Composer.  This seems like a pretty cool application to edit html files.

Another cool feature of Nvu is that it can automatically update your web site by using ftp or http.  Unfortunately, I have not enabled those mechanism to upload my html files.  I would love to see Nvu have support for scp to upload files.

Technorati Tags: Open Source

Outbound smtp service

In these post (post 1, post 2) I described how outgoing mail was hijacked while using a public wireless access points.  I solved this problem by sending mail through a ssh tunnel.  It looks like DynDNS is providing a service that accomplishes the same goal.

Their MailHop Outbound service provides an outgoing mail relay service.  They provide this service on standard and non-standard ports to prevent mail from being blocked.  Also they offer SSL connections to make sure your mail is secure.  It looks like they are charging $14.95/year for the ability to send up to 150 messages a day.

mailman

I have set up a web site for our Home Owners association, and when I did that I set up a mailing list for people on the board.  When I originally set it up, I just used a virtual map to map the one email address to the group of email addresses.

One thing that I didn't like about that solution was that it didn't automatically have a way to archive the posts.  Also, I didn't like the fact that it was such a manual process to add someone to the list.

Since I have used mailman for many of the mailing list that I subscribe to, I decided to install mailman.  The installation was very straight forward, and instructions were very clear.

WiFi at Willy's

Last night I went to Armadillo Willy's to pick up dinner.  When I was there, I noticed that they have a WiFi logos on the doors. 

And I didn't think that BBQ and laptops go together very well.

Changing link format

I changed the format of the urls for this blog to use custom urls.  I had not made this change before because all of the custom urls put the blog name in the url, which is redundant as it is the same as the domain name.

I found this page that describes how to setup custom urls when there is only one blog in pLog.  All of the old urls will still work.