An adventure in turning off greylisting…

Among other things, I run my own mail server for a few domains. On those domains, I use a method of combatting SPAM called greylisting. Basically, when another server wants to deliver mail, my server says “I’m too busy – try again later.” A valid mail server will still be around later to retry. A typical spammer’s ad-hoc server (that’s usually on a hijacked machine) won’t bother to try later even if it’s still around to do so.

In order to receive some time-sensitive mail recently, I turned greylisting off on a particular domain for the last 24 hours or so. The result was dramatic.

bpmv.cLog.js for Safely Wrapped Console Logging

Some JavaScript environments simply dont have the console object or don’t support all of the console functions. I get sick of either removing my debugging, doing oddball conditionals all over the place or re-writing the same wrappers all over again.

So here’s an addon to bpmv.js that will do all the heavy lifting. I’ll warn you that bpmv.cLog.js is experimental! I could change it at any time and I don’t consider it production ready (read the file before you use it).

Most of the console functions I could find for web browsers are in place. Some, like console.debug(), will fall back to console.log() if they don’t exist and console.log() does.

You can grab a copy along with bpmv.js at it’s GitHub home.

Better Smarty Debug

I’ve cleaned up and released my old variant on the Smarty debug template. Better navigation, better view of vars and using HTML5 as the basis. More improvements to come in the future.

The gist for it can be found on Github.