Tag: email

Installing Listmonk on Unraid

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I wanted to play about with Listmonk and it’s available as a Docker image, so I figured I’d just install it on my Unraid box. It doesn’t have a recipe in Community Apps but it’s not usually hard to reverse-engineer an official installation guide into something that “just works” on Unraid. After a first attempt failed, I looked around for a quick how-to guide online and mostly found… a mixture of people similarly failing to get it working or else having a kindly stranger offer to help… but not on the open Web where the rest of us can benefit from their knowledge. Sigh.

So I resolved that when I figured it out, I’d document the steps so that the next person after me can have an easier job of it.

Installing Listmonk on Unraid

  1. Install Postgres if you don’t have it already. I used the postgresql15 image from Community Apps.
  2. Set up a role and database. To do this, log in to your Postgres database using your favourite Postgres client and run, for example:
    CREATE USER listmonk WITH LOGIN PASSWORD 'my-listmonk-db-password';
    CREATE DATABASE listmonk OWNER listmonk;
  3. Create a Listmonk configuration file. I created a listmonk share and put it in there, calling it /listmonk/config.toml, but anywhere on your Unraid server will do. There’s a sample configuration in the repository. You’ll probably want to change:
    • [app] address: change to 0.0.0.0:9000 to listen on all interfaces so you can access it from elsewhere on your network (might not be needed if you intend to proxy with a host-networked reverse proxy server)
    • [app] admin_username / admin_password: obviously change these – this is how you’ll log in to your Listmonk system
    • [db] host: if your Postgres container and/or Listmonk container is running in bridged networking mode rather than host networking mode, you’ll need to change this to the name or IP address of your Postgres server
    • [db] password: set to the password you chose for the listmonk user on your Postgres server
  4. Add a Listmonk container. In Unraid, on the Docker tab, click the Add Container button. A minimal configuration might look like this:
    • Name: Listmonk
    • Repository: listmonk/listmonk:latest
    • Network Type: consider using Host to simplify your [db] setup, above.
    • Add a Port with Name: HTTP and Host Port: 9000. Then fill in 9000 as the value (or whatever port you want to run Listmonk on)
    • Add a Path with Name: Config and Container Path: /listmonk/config.toml. Set the Host Path to wherever you put the Listmonk configuration file, e.g. /mnt/user/listmonk/config.toml.
  5. Start the Listmonk container and watch it stop. When you click “Apply” the container will start, run for a few seconds, and then stop. If you want, look at the logs and you’ll see what the problem is: it needs to be started in a different way in order to set up the database. Instead, what we’ll do is spin up a new Listmonk container just for that purpose (and then throw it away).
  6. Start Listmonk in “install” mode. SSH into your Unraid server itself and run, e.g.
    docker run --rm -ti --net='host' -e TZ="UTC" -v '/mnt/user/listmonk/config.toml':'/listmonk/config.toml':'rw' listmonk/listmonk:latest ./listmonk -- --install
    Substitute /mnt/user/listmonk/config.toml for whatever path your configuration file is at, if applicable. You’ll be prompted with the messages “** first time installation **”, “** IMPORTANT: This will wipe existing listmonk tables and types in the DB ‘listmonk’ **”, and then asked “continue (y/N)?”. Press “y” and the installation will complete.
  7. Start the Listmonk container again. This time it’ll stay running and you’ll be able to access the Web interface via e.g. https://your-unraid-server:9000/

Hope that helps somebody!

Email newsletters via RSS

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I love feeds!

Maybe you’ve heard already, but I love RSS.

I love it so much that I retrofit sites without feeds into it for the convenience of my favourite reader FreshRSS: working around (for example) the lack of feeds in The Far Side (twice), in friends’ blogs, and in my URL shortener. Whether tracking my progress binging webcomic history, subscribing to YouTube channels, or filtering-out sports news, feeds are the centre of my digital life.

Illustration showing a web application with an RSS feed; the RSS feed is sending data to my RSS reader (represented by FreshRSS's icon).

 

There’s been a bit of a resurgence lately of sites whose only subscription option is email, or – worse yet – who provide certain “exclusive” content only to email subscribers.

I don’t want to go giving an actual email address to every damn service, because:

  • It’s not great for privacy, even when (as usual) I use a unique alias for each sender.
  • It’s usually harder to unsubscribe than I’d like, and rarely consistent: you need to find a recent message, click a link, sometimes that’s enough or sometimes you need to uncheck a box or click a button, or sometimes you’ll get another email with something to click in it…
  • I rarely want to be notified the very second a new issue is published; email is necessarily more “pushy” than I like a subscription to be.
  • I don’t want to use my email Inbox to keep track of which articles I’ve read/am still going to read: that’s what a feed reader is for! (It also provides tagging, bookmarking, filtering, standardised and bulk unsubscribing tools, etc.)

So what do I do? Well…

Illustration showing a web application using MailChimp to send an email newsletter to OpenTrashMail, to which FreshRSS is subscribed.

I already operate an OpenTrashMail instance for one-shot throwaway email addresses (which I highly recommend). And OpenTrashMail provides a rich RSS feed. Sooo…

How I subscribe to newsletters (in my feed reader)

If I want to subscribe to your newsletter, here’s what I do:

  1. Put an email address (I usually just bash the keyboard to make a random one, then put @-a-domain-I-control on the end, where that domain is handled by OpenTrashMail) in to subscribe.
  2. Put https://my-opentrashmail-server/rss/the-email-address-I-gave-you/rss.xml into my feed reader.
  3. That’s all. There is no step 3.

Now I get your newsletter alongside all my other subscriptions. If I want to unsubscribe I just tell my feed reader to stop polling the RSS feed (You don’t even get to find out that I’ve unsubscribed; you’re now just dropping emails into an unmonitored box, but of course I can resubscribe and pick up from where I left off if I ever want to).

Obviously this approach isn’t suitable for personalised content or sites for which your email address is used for authentication, because anybody who can guess the random email address can get the feed! But it’s ideal for those companies who’ll ocassionally provide vouchers in exchange for being able to send you other stuff to your Inbox, because you can simply pipe their content to your feed reader, then add a filter to drop anything that doesn’t contain the magic keyword: regular vouchers, none of the spam. Or for blogs that provide bonus content to email subscribers, you can get the bonus content in the same way as the regular content, right there in a folder of your reader. It’s pretty awesome.

If you don’t already have and wouldn’t benefit from running OpenTrashMail (or another trashmail system with feed support) it’s probably not worth setting one up just for this purpose. But otherwise, I can certainly recommend it.

Email Tracking and Paperless Banking

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A few weeks ago, my credit card provider wrote to me to tell me that they were switching me back from paperless to postal billing because I’d “not been receiving their emails”.

This came as a surprise to me because I have been receiving their emails. Why would they think that I hadn’t?

Dan, near his front door, reads his mail. His facial expression suggests that he's about to exclaim "What!?"
This is a re-enactment but I promise the facial expression is pretty much right.

Turns out they have a tracking pixel in their email to track that it’s been opened, as well as potentially additional data such as when it was opened (or re-opened), what email client or clients the recipient uses, what IP address or addresses they read their mail from, and so on.

Naturally, because I don’t like creepy companies tracking what I do on my own computers and try to minimise how much they can do so, I read most of my mail with remote content disabled:

An email from a credit card provider; images aren't displayed, but their alt-text is visible and the email is perfectly understandable. At the top, a banner reads "To protect your privacy, Thunderbird has blocked remote content in this message."
“To protect your privacy from fucking creepy banks misusing features of HTML emails, Thunderbird has blocked remote content in this message.” only tells half the story.

Jeremy just had something to say on this topic, too, based on his recent reading of Design for Safety by Eva PenzeyMoog:

Do you have numbers on how many people opened a particular newsletter? Do you have numbers on how many people clicked a particular link?

You can call it data, or stats, or analytics, but make no mistake, that’s tracking.

Follow-on question: do you honestly think that everyone who opens a newsletter or clicks on a link in a newsletter has given their informed constent to be tracked by you?

Needless to say, I had words with my credit card provider. Paperless billing is useful to almost everybody but it’s incredibly useful for blind and partially-sighted users (who are also the ones least-likely to have images loading in the first place, for obvious reasons) because your computer can read your communication to you which is much more-convenient than a letter. Imagine how annoyed you’d be if your bank wrote you a letter (which you couldn’t read but had to get somebody else to read to you) to tell you that because you don’t look at the images in their emails they’re not going to send them to you any more?

Even if you can somehow justify using tracking technologies (which don’t work reliably) to make general, statistical decisions (“fewer people open our emails when the subject contains the word ‘overdraft’!”), you can’t make individual decisions based on them. That’s just wrong.

Displaying ProtonMail Encryption Status in Thunderbird

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In a hurry? Get the Thunderbird plugin here.

I scratched an itch of mine this week and wanted to share the results with you, in case you happen to be one of the few dozen other people on Earth who will cry “finally!” to discover that this is now a thing.

Encrypted email identified in Thunderbird having gone through ProtonMail Bridge
In the top right corner of this email, you can see that it was sent with end-to-end encryption from another ProtonMail user.

I’ve used ProtonMail as my primary personal email provider for about four years, and I love it. Seamless PGP/GPG for proper end-to-end encryption, privacy as standard, etc. At first, I used their web and mobile app interfaces but over time I’ve come to rediscover my love affair with “proper” email clients, and I’ve been mostly using Thunderbird for my desktop mail. It’s been great: lightning-fast search, offline capabilities, and thanks to IMAP (provided by ProtonMail Bridge) my mail’s still just as accessible when I fall-back on the web or mobile clients because I’m out and about.

But the one thing this set-up lacked was the ability to easily see which emails had been delivered encrypted versus those which had merely been delivered “in the clear” (like most emails) and then encrypted for storage on ProtonMail’s servers. So I fixed it.

Four types of email: E2E encrypted internal mail from other ProtonMail users, PGP-encrypted email from non ProtonMail users, encrypted mail stored encrypted by ProtonMail, and completely unencrypted mail such as stored locally in your Sent or Drafts folder
There are fundamentally four states a Thunderbird+ProtonMail Bridge email can be in, and here’s how I represent them.

I’ve just released my first ever Thunderbird plugin. If you’re using ProtonMail Bridge, it adds a notification to the corner of every email to say whether it was encrypted in transit or not. That’s all.

And of course it’s open source with a permissive license (and a doddle to compile using your standard operating system tools, if you want to build it yourself). If you’re using Thunderbird and ProtonMail Bridge you should give it a whirl. And if you’re not then… maybe you should consider it?

Subscribe by Email

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For the last few months, I’ve been running an alpha test of an email-based subscription to DanQ.me with a handful of handpicked testers. Now, I’d like to open it up to a slightly larger beta test group. If you’d like to get the latest from this site directly in your inbox, just provide your email address below:

Subscribe by email!

Who’s this for?

Some people prefer to use their email inbox to subscribe to things. If that’s you: great!

What will I receive?

You’ll get a “daily digest”, no more than once per day, summarising everything I’ve published within the last 24 hours. It usually works: occasionally but not often it misses things. You can unsubscribe with one click at any time.

How else can I subscribe?

You can still subscribe in a variety of other ways. Personally, I recommend using a feed reader which lets you choose exactly which kinds of content you’re interested in, but there are plenty of options including Facebook and Twitter (for those of such an inclination).

Didn’t you do this before?

Yes, I ran a “subscribe by email” system back in 2007 but didn’t maintain it. Things might be better this time around. Maybe.

Emails to Melbourne’s trees

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This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Melbourne gave 70,000 trees email addresses so people could report on their condition. But instead people are writing love letters, existential queries and sometimes just bad puns.

…

In an effort to facilitate better tracking of the health of their trees, the city of Melbourne assigned an email address to each of them and allowed them to be looked-up using a map. The thinking was that people could email if a tree needed attention by the council, and the human that processed the email would automatically be able to determine the location of the plant.

But people started emailing the trees themselves. And not just people who’d seen them in person: people from all over the world. From “You are just outside my work and you make me happy :)” to “I love the way the light looks through your leaves and how your branches come down so low and wide it is almost as if you are trying to hug me. It is nice to have you so close, I should try to visit more often.” Delightful.

GMail Tip: Use A Plus Sign To Avoid Spam

49 comments

This technique’s about a decade old, but a lot of people still aren’t using it, and I can’t help but suspect that can only be because they didn’t know about it yet, so let’s revisit:

You have a GMail account, right? Or else Google for Domains? Suppose your email address is dan@gmail.com… did you know that also means that you own:

  • dan+smith@gmail.com
  • dan+something@gmail.com
  • dan+anything-really@gmail.com
  • d.an@gmail.com
  • d..a..n@gmail.com
  • …

You have a practically infinite number of GMail addresses. Just put a plus sign (+) after your name but before the @-sign and then type anything you like there, and the email will still reach you. You can also insert as many full stops (.) as you like, anywhere in the first half of your email address, and they’ll still reach you, too. And that’s really, really useful.

Filling in an Equifax registration form.
Often, you end up having to give your email address to companies that you don’t necessarily trust…

When you’re asked to give your email address to a company, don’t give them your email address. Instead, give them a mutated form of your email address that will still work, but that identifies exactly who you gave it to. So for example you might give the email address dan+amazon@gmail.com to Amazon, the email address dan+twitter@gmail.com to Twitter, and the email address dan+pornhub@gmail.com to… that other website you have an account on.

Why is this a clever idea? Well, there are a few reasons:

  • If the company sells your email address to spammers, or hackers steal their database, you’ll know who to blame by the email address they’re sending to. I’ve actually caught out an organisation in this way who were illegally reselling their mailing lists to third parties.
  • If you start getting unwanted mail from somebody (whether because spammers got the email or because you don’t like what the company is sending to you), you can easily block them. Even if you can’t unsubscribe or just because they make it hard to do so, you can just set up a filter to automatically discard anything that comes to that email address in future.
  • If you feel like organising your life better, you can set up filters for that, too: it doesn’t matter what address a company sends from, so long as you know what address they’re sending to, so you can easily have filters that e.g. automatically forward copies of the mortgage statement that come to dan+yourbank@gmail.com to your spouse, or automatically label anything coming to
    dan+someshop@gmail.com with the label “Shopping”.
  • If you’re signing up just to get a freebie and you don’t trust them not to spam you afterwards, you don’t need to use a throwaway: just receive the goodies from them and them block them at the source.
The email address dan+equifax@gmail.com being entered into a form.
Certainly, you can have… THIS email address.

I know that some people get some of these benefits by maintaining a ‘throwaway’ email address. But it’s far more-convenient to use the email address you already have (you’re already logged-in to it and you use it every day)! And if you ever do want a true ‘throwaway’, you’re generally better using Mailinator: when you’re asked for your email address, just mash the keyboard and then put @mailinator.com on the end, to get e.g. dsif9tsnev4y8594es87n65y4@mailinator.com. Copy the first half of the email address to the clipboard, and then when you’re done signing up to whatever spammy service it is, just go to mailinator.com and paste into the box to see what they emailed you.

A handful of badly-configured websites won’t accept email addresses with plus signs in them, claiming that they’re invalid (they’re not). Personally, when I come across these I generally just inform the owner of the site of the bug and then take my business elsewhere; that’s how important it is to me to be able to filter my email properly! But another option is to exploit the fact that you can put as many dots in (the first part of) your GMail address as you like. So you could put d…an@gmail.com in and the email will still reach you, and you can later filter-out emails to that address. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide how to encode information about the service you’re signing up to into the pattern and number of dots that you use.

Go forth and avoid spam.

Pay To Post

3 comments

I see that Facebook is experimenting with allowing you to pay a nominal fee to make sure that your posts end up “highlighted” over those of your friends’ other friends. That’s a whole new level of crazy… or is it?

A screenshot of Facebook's new "Highlight" feature.
A screenshot of Facebook's new "Highlight" feature. For about a quid, you can push your wall posts to the top of everybody's list.

I’m not on Facebook, but I think that this is a really interesting piece of news. The biggest thing that makes Facebook unusable (and which also affects Twitter) is that people will post every little banal thing that comes to their mind. I don’t care what you’re eating for your lunch. I don’t want to read the lyrics of some song that must have been written for you. I really can’t stand your chain messages (for a while there, after I hadn’t received any by email for a few years, I hoped that they’d died out… but it turns out that they just moved to Facebook instead). If you’re among my friends, I know that you have some pretty smart and interesting things to say… but unless I’m willing to spend hours sifting through the detritus it’s buried in, I’ll never find it.

Social Media Citation. The littering fine tickets of the digital generation.
Social Media Citation. The littering fine tickets of the digital generation.

But this might work. If the price sweet spot can be found, and it’s marketed right, then this kind of feature might make services like Facebook more tolerable. When you’re writing about a cute picture of the cat you’ve seen, that’s fine. And when you write something I might care about, you can tick the “this is actually relevant” box. You’ll have to pay a few pence, but at least you know I’ll see it. And if I want to churn through reams of “X likes Chocolate” (who doesn’t?) and “Y is… in a queue for the bus” then I can turn off the “only relevant things” mode and waste some time.

The problem is that the sweet spot will vary from person to person, and there’s no way to work around that. Big Bucks Bob can probably afford to pay a couple of pounds every time he wants to push some meme photo to the top of your feed, but Poor Penniless Penny can’t even justify ten pence to make sure that all of her friends hear about her birthday party.

Google+ tries to use heuristics to show you "top" content you might be interested in.
Google+ tries to use heuristics to show you "top" content you might be interested in. It feels less insidious than charging you, as Facebook will, but it still doesn't quite work.

It’s a pity that it won’t work, because a part of me is drawn to the idea that economic theory can help to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in our information-saturated lives. Turning my attention to email: of all the cost-based anti-spam systems, I was always quite impressed with Hashcash (which Microsoft seem to be reinventing with their Penny Black project). The idea is that your computer does some hard-to-do (but easy-to-verify) computational work for each and every email that it sends. But in its own way, Hashcash has a similar problem to Facebook’s new system: the ability to pay of a sender is not directly proportional to their relevance to the recipient. If my mother wants to send me an email from her aging smartphone, should she have to wait for several minutes while it processes and generates an “e-stamp”, just because – if it were made any faster – spammers with zombie networks of computers could do so too easily?

Yes, I just equated your social network status, about what you ate for your lunch, with spam. If you don’t like it, don’t share this blog post with your friends.

hashcash token: 1:20:120511:https://danq.me/2012/05/11/pay-to-post/::UVHo081pj6bSDWkI:00000000000001sxI

HDMI Virus, or How I Became An Old Person

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So I saw this HDMI cable online:

Apparently the plastic coating around this cable helps to prevent 'virus noises', whatever those are. Red scribbles added by me.

Somehow, this triggered a transformation in me. You know how when Eric eats a banana, an amazing transformation occurs? A similar thing happened to me: this horrendously-worded advertisement turned me into an old person. I wanted to write a letter to them.

My letter... er... email to Bluemouth Interactive.

There were so many unanswered questions in my mind: what is a “virus noise” (is it a bit like the sound of somebody sneezing?)? How a polyester coating protects against them? And what kind of viruses are transmitted down video cables, anyway?

It took them five days but, fair play to them, they – despite Reddit’s expectations – wrote back.

Bluemouth's response to me. Like the other pictures, you can click it to see it in full.

Their explanation? The ‘Virus’ was transcribed from French terminology for interference. It’s not a computer virus or anything like that.

The world is full of examples of cables being over-sold, especially HDMI cables and things like “gold-plated optical cables” (do photons care about the conductivity of gold, now?).

Does anybody have enough of a familiarity with the French language to let me know if their explanation is believable?

Something In The Water

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[this post was lost during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004; it was partially recovered on 21st March 2012]

People keep getting together. Kate and Leu, Tom and Liz (now with a journal!), and now: Sian and Andy. Must be something in the water. The latter pair (and the one I most recently heard about) is the most unexpected, and the middle one the most blatant. Sian and Andy???

Well, best of luck to them anyway: a long-distance relationship isn’t necessarily easy, but I’m sure that Sian knows that by now anyway.

I’ve challenged Paul to find the link between Tonari no Totoro, which we’ll be watching next Troma Night, and Troma. There is a link, and it’s a lot less complicated than he’s looking for. He has until Saturday before I tell him anyway.

I tried to send an e-mail to a load of people the other day, telling them about something I’ll later tell to one other person. Unfortunatley I accidently e-mailed the other person at the same time (was thinking about them … [the rest of this post, and one comment, are lost]

Cool Thing Of The Day

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Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #51:

Spend all night playing e-mail tennis with somebody cross-campus, simply because it’s 2:40am and you haven’t got anything you’d rather be doing (except sleeping, but I’m not sleepy, soo…).

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

Cool Thing Of The Day

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Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #48:

Discover, by sheer coincidence, that one of your more recent aquaintances down here (Claire) went to the same high school as one of your longer-running friends up North (Faye), and that they know one another! Freaky but completely true: the two parties are contactable on storm_lady0@yahoo.com and clb9@aber.ac.uk, for verification!

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.