Tag Archive for ‘Yahoo’ at elwoodicious

Jumping on teh intarnets bandwagon, I’ve been playing around with laying some pipe, Yahoo! style. Iskold and MacManus have the best explanation as they draw a parallel between it and relational databases and just like those databases it can have a bit of a learning curve but it allows for some pretty powerful and nifty connections to be made once you get a hang of it.

Below is a screenshot of my Planets Pipe which mixes together Gnome, KDE, and Ubuntu sorted descending by date then by post title.

Squiggly lines abound!

As far as Pipes go this is pretty basic as it just folds the feeds of three sites together into one, the real power lies in using operators to chop up, drill into, and slice ‘n’ dice the data. For example, you could build a Pipe that feeds you info about a geographic location from photos on Flickr, listings on Craigslist and Freecycle, concert information from Pollstar, and events from Meetup. That’s the beauty of pipes is that it treats the Internet like a giant database and you can sort, query, and mix data to your hearts delight. As for myself, I am still getting my head around it and musing over what sort of data mash would have the greatest utility in my life.

What kind of pipe would you lay (using Yahoo! :-P)?

One of the main benefits of sympathetic pregnancy insomnia is that I am able to get a jump on all these little projects that I had been meaning to take care of but never had the motivation. Configuring sendmail to use Yahoo Mail as a relay to handle outbound mail from Apache is one of those projects I’ve put off for far to long. Thanks to two HowTos I managed to knock this out in a couple of minutes.

sudo apt-get install sendmail

sudo /etc/init.d/sendmail stop

sudo nano /etc/mail/authinfo and add the following:

AuthInfo:yahoo.com “U:babydaddy@your_ATT_Domain” “I:babydaddy@your_ATT_Domain” “P:password_here” “M:PLAIN”
AuthInfo: “U:babydaddy@your_ATT_Domain” “I:babydaddy@your_ATT_Domain” “P:password_here” “M:PLAIN”

sudo chmod 660 /etc/mail/authinfo to lock it down.
sudo makemap hash /etc/mail/authinfo < /etc/mail/authinfo to make the map file.
sudo nano /etc/mail/sendmail.mc and look for or add the following lines:

define(`confAUTH_OPTIONS’, `A’)dnl
define(`confAUTH_MECHANISMS’, `LOGIN PLAIN DIGEST-MD5 CRAM-MD5′)dnl
TRUST_AUTH_MECH(`LOGIN PLAIN DIGEST-MD5 CRAM-MD5′)dnl
FEATURE(`authinfo’,`hash -o /etc/mail/authinfo.db’)dnl
define(`SMART_HOST’, `esmtp:[smtp.sbcglobal.yahoo.com]‘)dnl

sudo cp /etc/mail/sendmail.cf /etc/mail/sendmail.cf.bak because you can never to too sure.

sudo make /etc/mail/sendmail.cf -C /etc/mail to rebuild your sendmail.cf.
sudo /etc/init.d/sendmail start

To test your set up create a text file that at least includes a To and a Subject:To:ServerMonkey@foo
Subject:Linux Rules Windows Drools

sudo sendmail -Am -v -t < your_text_file to shoot a copy out to yourself.

You should see something like this:

babydaddy@your_ATT_Domain… Connecting to smtp.sbc.mail.yahoo4.akadns.net. via esmtp…
220 smtp110.sbc.mail.re2.yahoo.com ESMTP
>>> EHLO your_domain
250-smtp110.sbc.mail.re2.yahoo.com
250-AUTH LOGIN PLAIN XYMCOOKIE
250-PIPELINING
250 8BITMIME
>>> AUTH PLAIN xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
235 ok, go ahead (#2.0.0)
>>> MAIL From: AUTH=root@your_domain
250 ok
>>> RCPT To:
>>> DATA
250 ok
354 go ahead
>>> .
250 ok 1166057377 qp 49511
babydaddy@your_ATT_Domain… Sent (ok 1166057377 qp 49511)
Closing connection to smtp.sbc.mail.yahoo4.akadns.net.
>>> QUIT
221 smtp110.sbc.mail.re2.yahoo.com

sudo nano /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini so that it knows where sendmail hangs out.

Find the line with sendmail_path, delete the ; and edit it to read:

sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -i -t

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload to make the changes stick.

Sendmail is now configured to use Yahoo as a relay! Now, ideally you should be able to massage this to use any external SMTP server that allows plain text authentication.

Gratefully cribbed from here and here.