Sanity Software Wisdom

  • Amazon SimpleDB

    Amazon sent out an email this morning unveiling their newest web service, SimpleDB. Dear AWS Developers, This is a short note to let a subset of our most active developers know about an upcoming limited beta of our newest web service: Amazon SimpleDB, which is a web service for running queries on structured data in…

  • Avoid Emailing Bounced Addresses

    In the last post, I explained how I use VERP to handle email bounces and mark bad email addresses. I use email addresses as login handles, so I can’t just delete accounts with email addresses that have become invalid. However, I still want to avoid sending emails to addresses with permanent failures. The address verification…

  • VERP on Rails

    Web applications that send out emails usually process bounced emails in order to avoid sending emails to the bad addresses in the future. The standard technique for handling bounces is to use a variable envelope return path (VERP). If you are using Postfix with Ruby on Rails, setting up VERP for outgoing mail is easy.…

  • Cache-Control Header for Amazon S3

    Or “How to set a far future Expires header in S3 to appease the YSlow gods”. I’m working on a Ruby on Rails site that stores images and other static content on Amazon S3. We want Amazon to serve all of our images with a Cache-Control or Expires header set to a point in the…