A.P. Lawrence

Cellular Wireless Access Tips

Our summer weekend place is a two and a half hour drive away. That would only be true if we never had to stop for gas, food, shopping or never hit any bad traffic. More typical: four to five hours portal to portal. I just cannot be out of touch with my clients that long. Of course I have my cell phone, but more and more communication is all email.

I've already written about Cell Phone Internet Connections, but there are ways to make this a more pleasant experience. The cellular wireless access isn't slow but it's sure not broadband. With the older phone I use, it's about the same as good dialup. Perhaps more important is that cell phone connections get dropped every now and then, and that's particularly apt to be true if you are traveling. I usually wait until we are stopped before I make a connection, but sometimes urgent matters are afoot and I'll fire up while my wife drives.

Partially because of speed and partially because of that ever present possibility of losing the connection, I prefer to use text based mail while on the road. I COULD use GUI (it's not that slow), but going to text has advantages.

If you don't have an email account that gives you shell access, you really should consider it. A Google search for "shell occount" will turn up many. I've maintained such an account for many years at The World, and my Interland web site also offers that.

Command line mail - are you nuts?

OK, I know: it's too hard. It's that awful Unix command line stuff, impossible for ordinary human beings to learn and all that. If that's the way you feel, I'm probably not going to change your mind. It's really not that hard, and there are advantages. Keep in mind that I use GUI mail too: this is just while working with lower speed and less reliable access.

The first advantage is that you don't have to worry about viruses at all while using text mail. Nor do you wait for anything to download. If you are willing to learn a little bit about mail storage on your server, you don't even necessarily have to use command line mail: I often use nothing more than vi; that and other command line tools are particularly useful if your server stores mail as individual messages (qmail servers like the Mitel SME Server do that).

If you have a system with the more traditional mbox format, you either need to split the mbox up into individual messages or learn enough about "mail" to read and reply to messages. Neither is particularly difficult, and you can also just vi the whole darn thing - it sounds clumsy, but it really isn't and a minor familiarity with vi commands (VI Primer) and mail box formats is all you need. Or, many isp's have Pine or other "easier" mail clients.

My mail ends up on an SME server just before I pick it up with my Mac. It's already gone through two levels of filtering before it hits the Mac Bayesian filters and rules: my main server does its bit to block unwanted domains, and then the SME server does both spam and virus filtering, with spam messages automatically going to ~/Maildir/;junkmail and virus messages going to a special system quarantine folder. Virus messages cause another mail message to be generated that tells me that xyz sent a message that contained a virus. My email client is set to just automatically delete those (yes, if you send me mail that gets trapped in my virus scan, I will never see it - there are just too many to examine on the off chance that one is legitimate). However, if I'm sshed in and doing this manually, I need to get rid of them, so I have a script that I run when I login:

cd ~/Maildir/new
rm -f `grep -l "^Subject: Virus found in received message " *`
grep "^Subject:" *

That takes care of the virus notification messages, and gives me a quick listing of all other Subject lines so that I can see what I need to attend to immediately. I read the messages of interest with vi or just "more", move the ones I want to keep to ../cur, and delete the rest. If some new piece of uncaught spam has arrived en masse, an easily constructed "rm -f `grep -l` " will take care of those. That's useful when the spam filters haven't yet learned about some new piece of junk : I'll sometimes do this even while in my office for those circumstances. Just recently I had a hiccup on a customer's machine that caused it to send me the same message thousands of times over; command line removal was the only sensible fix.

These command line methods let me stay in touch under adverse conditions. It's all very quick and really not difficult.

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