Setting The Correct Sender Address In Postfix

My mac (work computer) is set up with usernames in the format of first inital, last name (lblue). We use Rackspace Email for our company email and our email addresses are set up as just FirstName@domain.com (Lee@domain.com). So, the problem with the default Postfix configuration is that it attempts to send mail based on the username on my mac. So when postfix attempts to send mail from lblue@domain.com our Rackspace Email server complains with a “Sender address rejected” error message. Fortunately, the solution is pretty easy.

Step 1: Edit your /etc/postfix/main.cf and add following line to your configuration.

sender_canonical_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sender_canonical

Step 2: Create the sender canonical file /etc/postfix/sender_canonical and set up the username / email address associations

lblue    Lee@domain.com

Step 3: Run postmap on your new sender canonical file

sudo postmap /etc/postfix/sender_canonical

Step 4: Reload Postfix

sudo postfix reload

git archive -o ~/Desktop/project.zip HEAD

That will extract your most recent stuff in your current branch, zip it up, and drop it on your desktop. We do a lot of WordPress plugin development and with this single command we can get our plugin code ready for installation extremely quickly. Here is more information about git archive.

Once your mac has SSH enabled, log into your Ubuntu machine and click Places –> Connect To Server. Choose SSH as your Service Type. Enter in the IP address of your mac or whatever name you may have assigned to it in your /etc/hosts file or whatever. Use the username and password you use to log into mac and there you go. You can browse files on your mac with your Ubuntu machine in Nautilus.

To do this you can go to Bookmarks –> Show All Bookmarks. Then in the upper right corner of your window you can search for the URL you want to delete. I’m frequently typing the domain of our development server so I can delete all of the development URLs they may be outdated. Once you see the URLs you want to delete, highlight them and press Delete. This is a little more cumbersome than Firefox’s Shift-Delete but at least it can be done.

Note: Both History and Bookmarks are used for the auto-fill feature. So even if you delete all of your history, the URLs from your Bookmarks will still be used for auto-fill. Of course, if you have bookmarked a page that is no longer available you probably want to delete that too.

I love using Gmail and I have several different email address for the various companies I work for. Gmail only lets me have one signature which is a bit of a problem because, depending on which from address I am using, I use different email signatures. There are a couple of Firefox add-ons that help with the problem but sometime I enjoy using other browsers like Safari. I have finally found the solution using QuickSilver and it’s Shelf feature.

QuickSilver And The Shelf

I’ve know about the Shelf on QuickSilver for a while now. It’s like a persistent clipboard. You can save snippets of text and then use that text later – like copying things to the clipboard but it stays there forever. So this was a good solution for my multiple email signature problem except that it took quite a few key stokes to get the text off the shelf and into my email. I set up triggers to do this but QuickSilver’s trigger display doesn’t handle the multi-line signature trigger very well. The name of the trigger spans multiple lines and overlaps the names of my other triggers. I hate that so I avoided using that as a solution. Also, it’s hard to think of enough unique keyboard shortcuts of each one of my five different signatures that don’t interfere with other shortcuts. So I created a trigger that just opened the shelf. Once the shelf is open I right-click the signature I want, then select paste from the actions menu. This was a fair solution, but the right-clicking and then hunting for paste in the pop-up actions menu was still a bit cumbersome.

Command Chains Can Be Stored On The Shelf

What I didn’t realize until today, was that you can store more than just text on the shelf. You can store chains of actions. So now my workflow is really nice. I have a keyboard shortcut that pulls up the Shelf then I just double-click on the signature I want and Blamo! my signature is in my email. Since this is a QuickSilver thing, I can use the signature for Mail.app, or Gmail and I can use any browser I want. It’s very nice. The one last tweak I wish I could figure out is how to get rich text in my signature because it seem that only plain text can be stored in QuickSilver’s shelf.

How To Store Command Chains On The Shelf

The huge realization I had today was that you can type Control-Enter rather than just Enter to make a chain of actions in QuickSilver. So I create the text (type . in the subject panel) for my email signature. Then tab to the action window and type paste the type Control-Enter and type Put on Shelf then click Execute. Now you can open your shelf, double-click your signature and it is pasted into whatever text area you were just in.

If anybody knows how to get rich text into the signature I would LOVE to know. I know that you can copy from Pages or Word or whatever and the bold, italics, links, etc come with you when you paste into Gmail. So I’ve thought about writing an AppleScript to open up a Pages document with my signature, copy the content to the clipboard, quitting Pages, then paste the clipboard. But the launching and quitting of pages takes too long and is more trouble than it’s worth.

Video Tutorial

Here is a quick video tutorial showing how to set all this up.

I like the option to check Google PageRank easily no matter what browser I am using so I wrote this quick little script to grab the PageRank of whatever page you are looking at and then pop open a little window to display the rank. All you need to do is drag the link below to your bookmarks bar on your browser.

Check PR

The Easy Way

Intead of hitting the Return key on your keyboard, hit the Enter key on the number pad. The new line that gets created will have the leading * and you can continue your comment. If you are on a laptop, hit function Return since you may not have a number pad.

The Slightly Harder Way

If you don’t want to fling your hand all the way over to your number pad and would prefer to just hit the normal Return key to continue your comment, you can create a TextMate Snippet to get TextMate to enter the leading * on the new line.

• Open the Bundle Editor
• Create a new Snippet
• Name the Snippet something like “phpdoc newline”
• Clear the default snippet text and enter this regular expression

${TM_CURRENT_LINE/(.*\/$)|.?(\/*(?!.*\/)).|./(?1:
:
(?2: ) )/}

• Set Activation: Key Equivalent
• Click in the Activation text box and press your Return key
• Set Scope Selector: source.php comment.block

Thank you to Clay Loveless for blogging about this Snippet

• Open a new mail message
• Create a link in your mail message
• Copy your link into your signature

Here is a quick screencast to show you how to pull this off. Not only does this work with links, but it also works with any other types of formatting in your mail message – bold, italics, fonts, etc.