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programming

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.

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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.
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creating a farming rpg harvest moon part 8

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

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.

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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.
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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.

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Creating a Farming RPG (like Harvest Moon) in Unity — Part 7: Growing and Harvesting Crops

Creating a Farming RPG (like Harvest Moon) in Unity — Part 7: Growing and Harvesting Crops

Ever wanted to create a game like Harvest Moon in Unity? Check out Part 7 of our guide here, where we go through how to grow and harvest crops. You can also find Part 6 of our guide here, where we went through how to create an in-game time management system.

A link to a package containing the project files up to Part 7 of this tutorial series can also be found at the end of this article, exclusive to Patreon supporters only.

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Pretty Computer Chips
Image by Jonas Svidras at https://stocksnap.io/photo/intel-8008-LBYK1XTHFC.

Passing a variable by value vs. reference

In programming, a concept that usually creates a lot of confusion among those new to it is the concept of passing a variable by value, versus passing a variable by reference. The 2 examples below illustrate the difference between these two ways variables can be passed in Java:

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A formula for rounding number

A formula for rounding numbers

Most programming languages come with native functions that help us round our numbers, either upwards (i.e. ceiling operation), downwards (i.e. floor operation), or to the nearest whole (i.e. round operation). While this is convenient, we sometimes need a bit more than that — what if — for example — we want to round our numbers to the nearest 0.5, or the nearest 3rd?

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PHP mail not delivering domain emails to external mail server

PHP mail not sending domain emails to external mail server

Recently, I’ve done some work for a client with an odd issue: the contact forms on their website (let’s call it client-website.com) — which delivered completed form enquiries using PHP’s mail() function — could not send emails through to email addresses containing their own domain.

This means that, if we were to set the form to deliver enquiries to an address like hello@client-website.com, the email would be completely dropped — you would neither find it in the junk or spam folders, nor find any trace of the email in their admin and mail logs. If we delivered the email to our own personal email addresses (e.g. personal@gmail.com), or to emails from another domain (e.g. mail@terresquall.com), then the email would go through (and skip right past the spam folder too).

For weeks, this problem confounded me, until now… and it’s actually a really simple fix.

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