Tobiasly’s Blog

We have used Vonage as our phone provider for almost a year now and have loved the service. One of the many features they add at no extra charge is the ability to have all voicemail messages sent as an email attachment. Unfortunately, they only send these attachments in WAV format, which means they take up a ton of room.

I like to store all voicemails I receive in case I need them later, and so I was looking for a way to shrink those emails down. I found this post describing how to do just that using Perl and LAME to convert the attachments to MP3.

Unfortunately, that script didn’t work quite right for me. I have cleaned it up a bit and posted it here for anyone interested.

[UPDATE] 2006.05.14: Towards the end of 2005, Vonage changed the format of their WAV file attachments to use an encoding called “CCITT u-Law” which LAME doesn’t understand. See my new post for a method using SOX instead.

I bought one of those USB flash “thumb drives” (a Cruzer Mini 256MB) a while back, and I keep it on my keychain. This has come in terribly handy when I need to move files around, but I’ve always been worried about keeping anything private or confidential on there. With my track record of losing my keys, I’d hate to think what would happen if someone found my drive and was able to start snooping around.

The drive came with a very lame program called “CruzerLock” that has a very un-intuitive interface. You basically had to drag any files you wanted to work with to and from its program window, and hope you remember to copy the files back (and delete the copies you made!) when you’re done. I ditched it in about three minutes.

After a bit of looking around at other “free” encryption packages (most of which are crippled versions of pay-to-use products), I came across TrueCrypt, a free, open-source encryption program for Windows XP/2000. TrueCrypt can either create a “container” file or encrypt an entire partition. It then “mounts” this file or partition as a regular drive after you supply the passphrase to unlock it. For the truly paranoid, it also offers the ability to create “hidden” containers within the main container.

Anyone who is interested in keeping private date secure should check out this wonderful, well-written, and easy-to-use program.
http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net/

Well, it seems that it’s time to switch web hosts yet again. I had been using Flux Services, which I was very happy with. They’re only $7.95 a month, which includes 1 GB disk space, 50 GB transfer, unlimited email addresses, 5 domain pointers, and 2 MySQL databases. They also have SSH access, which this Linux user considers a necessity. And they don’t charge extra for people who pay month-to-month, which is a nice (and rare) bonus.

Unfortunately, last week I tried to send just under 200 emails out to a mailing list. I got back a couple dozen bounces, which didn’t surprise me at first, because I didn’t know how good the addresses were. However, when I started to read the bounce messages, most of them said “unrouteable mail domain”. This was puzzling, since the domains were ones like yahoo.com, hotmail.com, aol.com, etc. Even more puzzling, some emails to the very same domains were making it through.

After much digging around, I found that this message can also be used when an SMTP server has rate limiting in effect. Sure enough, I contacted Flux Service’s support, and found they limit outgoing mail to a paltry 150 emails per hour! I was pretty upset, not only because I found this limit to be extremely low, and that their support seemed to be unwilling to help (besides suggesting I send emails through some ridiculous PHP “time-release” program), but because this policy was completely unadvertised, and the error message I received had nothing to do with the reason my emails were rejected. So I wasted over an hour of my time solving a “problem” that was really my own hosting company’s ridiculous policy!

I can understand they’re trying to prevent spammers, but considering their SMTP server requires authentication, it shouldn’t be difficult at all to track down and stop abuse using more reasonable means. So, I set out to look for a new web host. And I found one that I am very pleased with so far.

So now I’m with Site5 Hosting. For $1 less per month ($6.95, if paid annually), they offer 1.5 GB disk space, unlimited transfer, unlimited MySQL databases, SSH access, plus all the other usual stuff. Plus, they give me my own IP address! This is practically unheard-of on such a low-cost package. I was worried I’d get some maxed-out, slow server, but things seem even faster than they were before. Reading all their support forums sounds like people are very pleased with their service. And, they impose no limits on outgoing email!

Anyhoo, I’m posting this so that maybe the next person who googles “unrouteable mail domain” finds a bit more helpful info that I did, and finds just as good a solution as I did.

Update 4/25/2006: The information on Site5’s plans is no longer correct, and I’m transitioning my websites from Site5 to a VPS, but I’m leaving the rest of the post intact in case it’s useful for anyone.