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Sending Email with Wanderlust

At work we have a bunch of email addresses that get sent to a large set of users. Since I started, I've always gotten my mail forwarded to my personal email account, which works really well except for these mailing lists that complain that the mail being sent is not coming from the real email address. Seeing as I use Wanderlust and Emacs for my email, I knew there had to be a way to configure things to use my work smtp server for work emails and gmail for the rest. The key was looking at the the 'wl-draft-config-alist' setting. This is a simple list of key/values that get applied when a header or part of the body get matched. In my case, I wanted to match on the From field and send it via the correct smtp server.

Along side the 'wl-draft-config-alist' is the 'wl-templates-alist', which helps to setup a draft with appropriate headers. I should mention that I tried a ton of different settings to get this to work. I'm sure I could have put all this in my .wl file and that would have been enough, but alas that wasn't the case.

The first step is to go ahead and make a couple templates for writing mail. I created a default and an work template that maily just set the 'From' header to the appropriate value. After that I added some code to my 'wl-draft-config-alist' for each account. The the templates I added via customize in Emacs, while the 'wl-draft-config-alist' I was able to add to my .wl file. The latter seemed to fail when adding variables that needed to be changed. Here is an example of what I added:

(setq wl-draft-config-alist '( ("^From: .*eric@work.com" (wl-smtp-authenticate-type . "login") (wl-smtp-posting-user . "eric") (wl-smtp-posting-server . "webmail.work.com") (wl-local-domain . "work.com") (wl-from . "Eric Larson ") (wl-reply-to . "Eric Larson ") ) ("^From: .*eric@personal.org" (wl-smtp-authenticate-type . "plain") (wl-smtp-posting-user . "eric@personal.org") (wl-smtp-posting-server . "smtp.gmail.com") (wl-local-domain . "gmail.com") (wl-from . "Eric Larson ") (wl-reply-to . "Eric Larson ") ) ))

Not Writing

My writing has dropped off dramatically lately. This blog is not exactly the brainchild of an extremely prolific writer, but it also isn’t a stagnant pool of text bit rotting on the web. So what has changed?

The first big change has been some of my responsibilities at work. The project that was lead by my previous partner in crime has become more my responsibility. This isn’t really a promotion, but rather a shifting of guidance and responsibility. Even though it has not been a huge change, it is still change, which is rarely easy. Things have begun to pick up as we’ve gotten a bit of momentum, but it is still an adjustment for me.

The other big change has been less stark. There is some new music coming down the pipe, but it is not without its share of blood, sweat and tears. If anyone says recording a record is easy, they have never done it. And if by chance they have done it, then they weren’t successful at it. If they were successful at making a record and still claim it is easy then I don’t know what to tell you other than they are really lucky. This has been some of the toughest music to write and record. We’ve been playing for a really long time and while in sense our chemistry is pretty well solidified, it also feels somewhat too familiar at times. That feeling isn’t too much of a detractor, except, when after you finish an exceptionally painful recording process the only feed back suggests you have a lot more work to do and no money to do it with. The details aren’t terribly important, but it has been a really tough couple months.

The good side is that we have some tours coming up and, as I said before, we’ve gotten a bit of momentum at work. The goal is that some of that momentum can be directed towards writing. Whether or not it shows up on my blog is another question all together, but I’m sure that there will be some more reflections and discoveries I’d like to share sooner rather than later.