Setting up a virtual Postfix mail server — Part 3

Setting up a virtual Postfix mail server — Part 3: Implementing DKIM, DMARC and rDNS

In the previous part of this tutorial series, we set up a mail server that could accept connections from mail clients like Gmail. This allowed us to send out domain emails using a mail client, instead of having to implement a mailbox on our server.

With our mail server’s basic functionality properly set up, we can now turn our attention to another problem — email deliverability. Spam email is a really big problem online, so many email providers have some kind of system in place to assess whether an incoming email is spam and either flag it, or reject it. Hence, after setting up our mail server, one thing we need to do is to ensure that our mail server conforms to certain email security standards, policies and protocols. This goes a long way to help us communicate to other mail servers that we are trustworthy, so that our emails will be deliverable.

Continue reading →
0
Setting up a virtual Postfix mail server — Part 2

Setting up a virtual Postfix mail server — Part 2: Sending emails with SASL

In the first part of this series, we set up a basic virtual mail server with Postfix that received emails for our domain and forwarded it to a mailbox of our choice. To round off the basic set of features for our mail server, we will be setting up Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL) to work with Postfix, so that we can access our mail server with a mailbox client (like Gmail) and send out emails from our domain.

Continue reading →
0
Setting up a virtual Postfix mail server — Part 1

Setting up a virtual Postfix mail server — Part 1: Receiving emails with mail forwarding

If you own a domain, and are looking to set up email hosting for it, you have a couple of options. You can either:

  1. Get a generic web hosting service that comes with a cPanel-based email hosting service, or;
  2. Use services like Google Workspace or Microsoft’s Enterprise Email Service.

The former option is cheap, but can be clunky to use and ineffective with blocking spam. The latter option — being specialised services — are generally much more accessible and effective with spam, but cost more.

There’s actually also a third option, and that is:

  1. Running your own mail server on a cloud server.

This means that you have to set up the server and maintain it, but it also means that you can have a cheap and effective mail server, instead of having to choose between one or the other.

In this series of articles, we are going to explore how we can set up a virtual mail server using a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) called Postfix. This will be a fully-featured mail server, meaning that over the course of these articles, we will be building a mail server that can:

  1. Send and receive emails,
  2. Filter incoming emails for spam, and;
  3. Pass email policy checks, so that the emails it sends out are not flagged as spam.
Continue reading →
1
Setting up Unity's Device Simulator

Setting up Unity’s Device Simulator

Unity’s Device Simulator is a very nice extension in Unity that allows users to quickly and easily test out their games on a mobile platform. It extends the Game window by adding a dropdown that allows the user to switch between the Game view and a newly-added Simulator view.

Continue reading →
0

Content begins after the advertisement:

 

creating a farming rpg harvest moon part 8

Creating a Farming RPG (like Harvest Moon) in Unity — Part 8: Regrowing and Wilting Crops

This article is a part of the series:
Creating a Farming RPG (like Harvest Moon) in Unity

Ever wanted to create a game like Harvest Moon in Unity? Check out Part 8 of our guide here, where we go through how to make crops that can be harvested multiple times, along with a system that allows for them to die. You can also find Part 7 of our guide here, where we went through how to grow and harvest crops.

A link to a package containing the project files up to Part 8 of this tutorial series can also be found at the end of this article, exclusive to Patreon supporters only.

Continue reading →
5
Fixing a jittery camera in Unity
Screenshot from Cobalt Blue, a game currently in development.

Fix jittery camera movement in Unity with Rigidbody Interpolate

If you’ve got a player character in your game that derives its movement from a Rigidbody or Rigidbody2D component in Unity, and you write a script to make your camera follow it, you will likely see jittering in your camera movement.

Here’s an example:

Camera jitter in Unity
It’s not very noticeable if you don’t move at high speeds.
Continue reading →
7
Animator does not contain a definition for SetBool

Unity C# error: Animator does not contain a definition for ‘SetBool’

Recently, I came across an error that was quite the head-scratcher while grading some Unity scripts. Here’s what the error says:

Animator does not contain a defintion for 'SetBool'
The myAnim variable was set with myAnim = GetComponent<Animator>() earlier on.

But SetBool() is a valid method in the Animator component from Unity, so what exactly is going on here?

Continue reading →
1

Content begins after the advertisement:

 

Importing CSV files into a MySQL table

Importing a CSV file into an SQL table

CSV stands for Comma-Separated Values, and CSV files are text files that look something like this:

example.csv

Username,Email,Address,Contact
johndoe,john@example.com,"71 Pickering Street, Singapore, Singapore",+65-91234567
janedoe,jane@website.com,"24 Raffles Lane, Singapore, Singapore",+65-81234567
marysmith,mary@smith.com,"83 Riveting Road, Singapore, Singapore",+65-97654321
bobsmith,bob@smith.com,"84 Riveting Road, Singapore, Singapore",+65-87654321

Essentially, the CSV file format is meant to represent tabular data. The above CSV file represents the following table:

UsernameEmailAddressContact
johndoejohn@example.com71 Pickering Street, Singapore, Singapore+65-91234567
janedoejane@website.com24 Raffles Lane, Singapore, Singapore+65-81234567
marysmith mary@smith.com 83 Riveting Road, Singapore, Singapore +65-97654321
bobsmith bob@smith.com 84 Riveting Road, Singapore, Singapore +65-87654321

Due to their tabular nature, data in a CSV file can very easily be imported into and stored in an SQL table. The commands to do that, however, are not very well-documented online.

If a CSV file does not open as a text file on your computer, that’s because your computer is opening the file with a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel. In such a case, to see the file as text, you will want to open these files on a text editing software such as Notepad.

Continue reading →
0
Python in XAMPP

Running Python in XAMPP

Are you looking to run Python as a server-side scripting language on your XAMPP installation? Here’s a guide on how to set it up.

Continue reading →
5