2025-04-30

I feel like I need to re-state my previous thoughts on AI crawlers and scrapers. I do not have a problem wth them SO LONG AS THEY BEHAVE. We have conventions on the web to guide this kind of web activity for a reason. Anything or anyone who chooses to willfully disregard the directions of, for example robots.txt, should be blocked or better yet "dealt with" without remorse. If your crawler is crashing my site, don't be surprised if my site crashes your crawler.

IMAP is weird sometimes. I use offlineimap to sync my email locally. I do this for a few reasons. First is because I have some large mailboxes and I don't like waiting for mutt to read the header cache every time I open a new mailbox. Second is because I occasionally work from locations with little to no internet (I've written some on this in the past... I should tidy up my thoughts on this...). Using offlineimap in conjuction with msmtp allows me to read and write email asynchronously from Internet availability. Aaaaaanyway, I bumped in to a weird one today. Offlineimap wa refusing to fully sync one of my mailboxes, always hanging on the same message UID for one of my mailing list subscriptions. The best I could find on the web about this issue was a mailing list thread from 2009 which remains unresolved to this day. It seems like this is a rare but stubborn issue that can crop up and the jury is still out on if it's an issue with dovecot or offlineimap. The solution to this one ended up being one that I didn't like but it "worked". Using doveadm, you can expunge a message by UID from a mailbox. I would not have wanted to do this on a message I actually cared about but, thankfully, this time it was just an old mailing list message from a list I rarely read in depth anyway.