Warning: This is a bit of a rant, so read on only if you're in a bad mood and want someone to cuss at (either me or the entity I'm cussing at ;) )

I had recently bought email hosting services for my Mom from Net4 following decent service on the domain and web hosting front. It was a stupid decision. Net4 support for email pretty much sucks. Maybe I have only been lucky with the web hosting support too as I did not have to deal with morons for the most part. For the last two days I haven't been so lucky.

I noticed the problem soon after the email hosting got activated — emails that I would send to any gmail accounts would go into the spam folder. I ignored it in the beginning mainly because I wasn't interested enough to look hard for what is wrong. But recently mom started complaining about it since her customers were not getting her emails. So we opened a ticket with Net4. For good measure, I also called so that I get immediate feedback. I was told to attach a sample email that went into spam. I did that. The support person then closed the ticket the next day asking for a sample email. Interesting.

So I open a support ticket once again and this time I try to do some research on why gmail may be doing this. I noticed the following header:

Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: xx.yy.zz.aa is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of mom@example.com) client-ip=xx.yy.zz.aa;

So I look up google and come across this article on SPF records. Apparently, net4 ought to be adding an SPF entry for my domain associating it with their mail servers. This entry will lead to the Received-SPF header being "pass" instead of "neutral". This is something that gmail takes into consideration while filtering for spam. While I realize that there may be other matters (email content, subject, etc.), all those factors do not come into the picture with my sample email. This seems to be the only missing link since my domain, mail server, etc. are not blacklisted either. I mention it in the support ticket and again attach the sample email. The ticket gets closed again with a request for a sample email. WTF?

I call up and ask the support tech. I try explaining about SPF and how that might be affecting things and he goes all ballistic (not figuratively, he's positively shouting) on me saying that this is on Linux and it does not work the way I am saying. With my ego hurt, I shouted back saying that I work for a Linux company :P

We end the call with the tech telling me that I am only throwing keywords around without knowing anything about it. He asks me how I would fix this and I admit that I don't know right away but I can do his job and look it up. He then bullshits me about how it is "the pop3 end which marks the spam with either SPAM tag in subject or moving to a spam folder" and so on. According to him SPF is something different and there is nothing wrong with it. He ended it saying that I was being an ass and that he will escalate the issue.

No, there is no hope. The last two issues were escalated too. Apparently everyone at Net4 is just a bunch of incompetent fools. Either that or those who aren't are eyeing management positions since that is the "way up the ladder". Or they're on their way out.

I think I need to be on my way out of this service. I may not get a refund this time but I can surely make sure that I don't renew my services with them and definitely not recommend their services to people I care about.

I finally got myself to start working on the pjpdns stuff and the cdb vs tinycdb question resolved itself pretty soon as far as pjpdns is concerned. Some functions and their arguments (cdb_findnext, cdb_findstart, etc.) have changed in tinycdb due to which pjpdns would not link against it as is. I would have to patch it to get it working.

Of course, being a lazy bum, I took the easy route and linked against my fork of cdb, which worked. Here is my fork of pjpdns with the changes. There are still some things that can be trimmed out in pjpdns as a result of this. There's also the entire "unlicensed code" thing I need to sort out since a lot of code in the original cdb does not have any license.

There are also a bunch of other changes I made to pjpdns, which included removing some auto-generated cruft from the repository and adding a bit of autotools candy so that any future autotools related changes don't result in git-log spam.

PJP had given a presentation some weeks ago on what would probably end up being pjpdns. One of the problems pointed on on his review request for inclusion of djbdns into Fedora was that it included code for cdb, which exists as a separate package and hence should be dynamically linked to instead. Someone even pointed out that (s)he had autotoolized cdb but did not respond to any further requests for more information.

I figured it was something I could do, so I went ahead and ported cdb to gnu-autotools. Here is my cdb fork. There is still some code which is unused, but I haven't really bothered to update in much since the time I found tinycdb, which seems to be maintained too. So my next project is to try and get djbdns to either use tinycdb or if that fails, my cdb fork.

I wonder how I can license the cdb fork though (if I decide to distribute it at some point). A lot of code is unlicensed, which is why (according to wikipedia) the tinycdb fork was written in the first place.

Oh, and let it be recorded officially and publicly that if pjpdns goes live, it was me who misread djbdns during the beginning of the presentation as pjpdns. Yes, that is my desperate attempt at being relevant to something completely unrelated :D

I have finally got myself an account on github. My first fork (obviously) is ayttm. Here I'll be putting in all the major destructive changes I cannot put into the main repository right away since even I'm not sure if it is a good idea in the first place. The first commit is the revamped conversation stuff. Note that chat_room.* is out and conversation.* is in. And a lot of code has changed. And a lot of things have broken.

The last day of FOSS.in. Kartik wakes me up saying "You have to pack, get up". I got up, went across the hall and rang Ram²'s bell a few times to wake him up.

So I packed up my stuff and got ready. This time I did not forget to wear my fedora. We had our breakfast and realized that a number of people had left early, either for the venue or to meet someone in the city. When we went out to our bus, we found that it was not there. We started talking to rickshaw drivers and bargaining with them when one guy came up to us saying that he was here to take some people from the hotel to NIMHANS. That was us. But we weren't sure, so we had him call his boss and confirmed that it was indeed us.

Susmit: "Well, if he wanted to drop us to the venue then why are we wasting time calling people? Why not just pile into the bus and go ;)".

So we finally reached the venue, only to find that it was almost deserted. People started crawling in quite late and the place eventually filled up. I sat down with Kital at the Fedora booth and fixed my package submission for Fedora. At 12:00 I went up to Lennart's FSH talk, but did not find it as useful as the previous talk. He could just have combined this one with the last talk and done one marathon talk, but I guess that would have been too long. Anyway, it was time for lunch.

I was pretty listless after lunch because there wasn't enough time to hack on anything significant, so I decided to take a nap at the booth. I woke up to find that I had only 20 minutes to say good bye to all the people I came to know during these 5 days. Wait, a phone call. An automated message telling me that my flight had been delayed by half an hour. Well, I had some more time now, so I went up to the hack centre to check out who was doing what. I bugged Gopal for the Speaker kit and he finally shooed me off with some stickers. I told him that the coordinators had done a great job, something I managed to notice this time since I was not sitting in the corner and hacking like last year.

While I was roaming about, I entered the Gnome POTD and saw Oliviere Crete giving a talk on Telepathy. I sat down and listened. And I have to admit that I was quite impressed with the layout. I remember wondering why I was working on getting ayttm and libyahoo2 up to speed when such a wonderful effort was underway to do messaging the *right* way. Now that I think of it though, it is not the only right way to do things. While ayttm may not be as extensible as the Telepathy framework+Empathy, etc, it has a totally different use case. To be able to fit into a sub-1 MB package and work well with minimal dependencies. And it can work on *BSD. The workout participation for ayttm unfortunately fizzled out since it was pulled off the itinerary and it is not popular or cool enough for people to want to contribute to it. But I managed to make some headway into the chat window stuff and will hopefully get that out of the way soon. Next week I plan to work on the webcam stuff for yahoo at Rahul's request. OK, I digressed.

I had to leave the talk halfway since I was getting late. I stepped out of the hall and managed to say goodbye to everyone I recognized and could catch hold of. I managed to find Pradeepto just as I hauled my bags up to leave. We said our goodbyes and I left for the gate, trying to find a rickshaw. But what I found was a bus, a BIAS-7 going to the airport :)

So I'm now sitting in the airport lounge reflecting back on one of the best events I've attended so far. This was very special for me because I got to know a lot of very good guys: Pradeepto, Aanjhan, Sayamindu, Joerg, Gopal, Susmit and so many others. The best part of the week was the BoF sessions all of us would have in Pradeepto's room, talking about foobar and sharing stories. I did not have too many uber hacks to talk about through this week, but a lot of cool incidents that seemed to make a big difference to the way I thought about the Indian FOSS movement and the people involved.

This was fun. I hope I get to do this more often.