postfix can deliver e-mails again towards Microsoft addresses

2021-07-29 12:00

Sebastian Schauenburg

Recently I upgraded to my new, freedom-loving, pro-privacy Internet Service Provider Freedom Internet. I was already running a mailserver before I switched: postfix. For years I had no issues sending out e-mails towards other mailservers. After I upgraded though, it seemed I was unable to send e-mail to Microsoft e-mail addresses. I noticed it only after a few months, when I tried to reach someone with an @live.nl e-mail address.

TL;DR

So I decided to change my reverse DNS record from something.connected.by.freedominter.net to something.domain.tld And behold, my e-mail was now being accepted again by Microsoft.

So although Microsoft's policies and guidelines state "Email servers must have valid reverse DNS records.", that is not the entirely true. I assume that Microsoft rejects e-mail servers with rDNS records with more than 2 dots. Beware if you use multiple DNS zones.

offlineimap - unicode decode errors

2021-07-10 16:00

Sebastian Schauenburg

My main system is currently running Ubuntu 21.04. For e-mail I'm relying on neomutt together with offlineimap, which both are amazing tools. Recently offlineimap was updated/moved to offlineimap3. Looking on my system, offlineimap reports itself as OfflineIMAP 7.3.0 and dpkg tells me it is version 0.0~git20210218.76c7a72+dfsg-1.

Unicode Decode Error problem

Today I noticed several errors in my offlineimap sync log. Basically the errors looked like this:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xfc in position 1299: invalid start byte
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xeb in position 1405: invalid continuation byte

Solution

If you encounter it as well (and you use mutt or neomutt), please have a look at this great comment on Github from Joseph Ishac (jishac) since his tip solved the issue for me.

To "fix" this issue for future emails, I modified my .neomuttrc and commented out the default send encoding charset and omitted the iso-8859-1 part:

#set send_charset = "us-ascii:iso-8859-1:utf-8"
set send_charset = "us-ascii:utf-8"

Then I looked through the email files on the filesystem and identified the ISO-8859 encoded emails in the Sent folder which are causing the current issues:

$ file * | grep "ISO-8859"
1520672060_0.1326046.desktop,U=65,FMD5=7f8c0215f16ad5caed8e632086b81b9c:2,S: ISO-8859 text, with very long lines
1521626089_0.43762.desktop,U=74,FMD5=7f8c02831a692adaed8e632086b81b9c:2,S:   ISO-8859 text
1525607314.R13283589178011616624.desktop:2,S:                                ISO-8859 text

That left me with opening the files with vim and saving them with the correct encoding:

:set fileencoding=utf8
:wq

Voila, mission accomplished:

$ file * | grep "UTF-8"
1520672060_0.1326046.desktop,U=65,FMD5=7f8c0215f16ad5caed8e632086b81b9c:2,S: UTF-8 Unicode text, with very long lines
1521626089_0.43762.desktop,U=74,FMD5=7f8c02831a692adaed8e632086b81b9c:2,S:   UTF-8 Unicode text
1525607314.R13283589178011616624.desktop:2,S:                                UTF-8 Unicode text

Translators, please do not translate everything

2021-01-11 20:00

Sebastian Schauenburg

TL;DR

I'm grateful for translations by translators. But translating everything causes icons to break. Ubuntu MATE 20.04 has several broken icons and most of them are fixed in Ubuntu MATE 20.10 already.

Advice: Please do NOT translate the 'Icon' text, just leave that translation blank (""). Copy/pasting the English text will cause superfluous lines in .desktop files and might cause additional work later (if the original name is updated, you will need to copy and paste that string again). So getting a 100% translation score, might even be non-optimal.