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Google scripts, google, and email

by Aldebaran (Curate)
on Oct 10, 2022 at 03:59 UTC ( [id://11147317]=perlquestion: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

Aldebaran has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello Monks,

Welcome to the "christian" russian Halloween, where they threaten the entire world with nuclear destruction because of our gay day parades. So much has happened to the internet since February 24th, I would hardly be able to compare the before and after. One thing that happened was that Google went with Auth 2.0, which I believe has had a remarkable effect which I call The Silence of the Trolls. An entire host of bots went silent from my perspective. I haven't heard Skabeyeva for months and must say I like the Skabeyava Divide, where Russian Megatrolls went silent to us. I would say that the internet is balkanized now. We still have loudmouth revisionist liars on the Boob Tube, but they are mostly homegrown.

I just tried out my heavily-reliant-on-google-translation script to find out that it doesn't work. None of many versions do right now, and I don't know why. I get different errors with different scripts, and I'm confused.

Q1) Does anybody else have google-reliant translation scripts that are failing now? In the past, I've had an account with them. I have to wonder out loud whether this is now a requirement.

In fairness to the Google, it is most-likely my problem rather than theirs, so I want to be clear about that. But I have another problem with Google that I would like to ask my german friends in particular about. My situation is this, I'm part of a "social club" that isn't very web-savvy. We have a site, but barely use it, and it looks like something cobbled together by committee, which accurately describes its evolution. We have 1 picture and 4 statically-rendered pages.

As chance would have it, I became the secretary of this "temperance club," which is a hybrid in-person/on-line platypus, that didn't exist before the pandemic. As chance would further have it, I am to be in charge of the master records of this club. Finally, there is a suggestion in front of us that we keep our master records on Google. I'm not sure that anyone understands that we could host records on our own site instead of giving them to a company that is known to mine our data.

Q2) If you were part of a group that names anonymity as the foundation of all its traditions, what would you say to keeping master records with google as opposed to our own darn site? hippo, you can go to town with that one, but I'll ask that the comments reflect how I might say things to convince people I don't want to offend rather than calling them dumb fat American nincompoops, which only describes half of us:-).

I have other questions about email. Is it me, or is the entire universe of email changed this year as well? Back in the day, we could be agnostic as to the transport mechanism, but how on earth do you sort that out in today's world for the general case? Let me throw out an example. Could haukex in Berlin send an email to the staff at Moscow State University and expect it to show up?

Let me broach this from another angle. I think we all have a "relationship" to email in the same way we are strung out on our telephones, with an experience that is likely to correspond to our age. Our Ami Boomers seem to love it. Gen X like me is frustrated with it. Gen Z can't be reached this way. When I see an idea that involves a mass email, I want to roll my eyes. I don't think people accomplish what they set out to do. I just see it as this ginormous spam generator. Furthermore, the amount of garbage data created by missing with a few out fifty addresses is enormous. I fear these wraiths will never die.

When I see email, I see this representation too:

pat => qr((?:(?^:(?:(?^:(?>(?^:(?^:(?>(?^:(?>(?^:(?>(?^:(?^:(?>\s*\((? +:\s*(?^:(?^:(?>[^()\\]+))|(?^:\\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D]))|))*\s*\)\s*))|(?>\s ++))*[^\x00-\x1F\x7F()<>\[\]:;@\\,."\s]+(?^:(?^:(?>\s*\((?:\s*(?^:(?^: +(?>[^()\\]+))|(?^:\\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D]))|))*\s*\)\s*))|(?>\s+))*))|\.|\s +*"(?^:(?^:[^\\"])|(?^:\\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D])))+"\s*))+))|(?>(?^:(?^:(?>(? +^:(?^:(?>\s*\((?:\s*(?^:(?^:(?>[^()\\]+))|(?^:\\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D]))|))* +\s*\)\s*))|(?>\s+))*[^\x00-\x1F\x7F()<>\[\]:;@\\,."\s]+(?^:(?^:(?>\s* +\((?:\s*(?^:(?^:(?>[^()\\]+))|(?^:\\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D]))|))*\s*\)\s*))|( +?>\s+))*))|(?^:(?>(?^:(?^:(?>\s*\((?:\s*(?^:(?^:(?>[^()\\]+))|(?^:\\( +?^:[^\x0A\x0D]))|))*\s*\)\s*))|(?>\s+))*"(?^:(?^:[^\\"])|(?^:\\(?^:[^ +\x0A\x0D])))*"(?^:(?^:(?>\s*\((?:\s*(?^:(?^:(?>[^()\\]+))|(?^:\\(?^:[ +^\x0A\x0D]))|))*\s*\)\s*))|(?>\s+))*)))+))?)(?^:(?>(?^:(?^:(?>\s*\((? +:\s*(?^:(?^:(?>[^()\\]+))|(?^:\\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D]))|))*\s*\)\s*))|(?>\s ++))*<(?^:(?^:(?^:(?>(?^:(?^:(?>\s*\((?:\s*(?^:(?^:(?>[^()\\]+))|(?^:\ +\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D]))|))*\s*\)\s*))|(?>\s+))*(?^:(?>[^\x00-\x1F\x7F()<>\ +[\]:;@\\,."\s]+(?:\.[^\x00-\x1F\x7F()<>\[\]:;@\\,."\s]+)*))(?^:(?^:(? +>\s*\((?:\s*(?^:(?^:(?>[^()\\]+))|(?^:\\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D]))|))*\s*\)\s* +))|(?>\s+))*))|(?^:(?>(?^:(?^:(?>\s*\((?:\s*(?^:(?^:(?>[^()\\]+))|(?^ +:\\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D]))|))*\s*\)\s*))|(?>\s+))*"(?^:(?^:[^\\"])|(?^:\\(? +^:[^\x0A\x0D])))*"(?^:(?^:(?>\s*\((?:\s*(?^:(?^:(?>[^()\\]+))|(?^:\\( +?^:[^\x0A\x0D]))|))*\s*\)\s*))|(?>\s+))*)))\@(?^:(?^:(?>(?^:(?^:(?>\s +*\((?:\s*(?^:(?^:(?>[^()\\]+))|(?^:\\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D]))|))*\s*\)\s*))| +(?>\s+))*(?^:(?>[^\x00-\x1F\x7F()<>\[\]:;@\\,."\s]+(?:\.[^\x00-\x1F\x +7F()<>\[\]:;@\\,."\s]+)*))(?^:(?^:(?>\s*\((?:\s*(?^:(?^:(?>[^()\\]+)) +|(?^:\\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D]))|))*\s*\)\s*))|(?>\s+))*))|(?^:(?>(?^:(?^:(?> +\s*\((?:\s*(?^:(?^:(?>[^()\\]+))|(?^:\\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D]))|))*\s*\)\s*) +)|(?>\s+))*\[(?:\s*(?^:(?^:[^\[\]\\])|(?^:\\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D]))))*\s*\] +(?^:(?^:(?>\s*\((?:\s*(?^:(?^:(?>[^()\\]+))|(?^:\\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D]))|) +)*\s*\)\s*))|(?>\s+))*))))>(?^:(?^:(?>\s*\((?:\s*(?^:(?^:(?>[^()\\]+) +)|(?^:\\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D]))|))*\s*\)\s*))|(?>\s+))*)))|(?^:(?^:(?^:(?>( +?^:(?^:(?>\s*\((?:\s*(?^:(?^:(?>[^()\\]+))|(?^:\\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D]))|)) +*\s*\)\s*))|(?>\s+))*(?^:(?>[^\x00-\x1F\x7F()<>\[\]:;@\\,."\s]+(?:\.[ +^\x00-\x1F\x7F()<>\[\]:;@\\,."\s]+)*))(?^:(?^:(?>\s*\((?:\s*(?^:(?^:( +?>[^()\\]+))|(?^:\\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D]))|))*\s*\)\s*))|(?>\s+))*))|(?^:(? +>(?^:(?^:(?>\s*\((?:\s*(?^:(?^:(?>[^()\\]+))|(?^:\\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D]))| +))*\s*\)\s*))|(?>\s+))*"(?^:(?^:[^\\"])|(?^:\\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D])))*"(?^ +:(?^:(?>\s*\((?:\s*(?^:(?^:(?>[^()\\]+))|(?^:\\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D]))|))*\ +s*\)\s*))|(?>\s+))*)))\@(?^:(?^:(?>(?^:(?^:(?>\s*\((?:\s*(?^:(?^:(?>[ +^()\\]+))|(?^:\\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D]))|))*\s*\)\s*))|(?>\s+))*(?^:(?>[^\x0 +0-\x1F\x7F()<>\[\]:;@\\,."\s]+(?:\.[^\x00-\x1F\x7F()<>\[\]:;@\\,."\s] ++)*))(?^:(?^:(?>\s*\((?:\s*(?^:(?^:(?>[^()\\]+))|(?^:\\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D +]))|))*\s*\)\s*))|(?>\s+))*))|(?^:(?>(?^:(?^:(?>\s*\((?:\s*(?^:(?^:(? +>[^()\\]+))|(?^:\\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D]))|))*\s*\)\s*))|(?>\s+))*\[(?:\s*(? +^:(?^:[^\[\]\\])|(?^:\\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D]))))*\s*\](?^:(?^:(?>\s*\((?:\s +*(?^:(?^:(?>[^()\\]+))|(?^:\\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D]))|))*\s*\)\s*))|(?>\s+)) +*)))))(?>(?^:(?>\s*\((?:\s*(?^:(?^:(?>[^()\\]+))|(?^:\\(?^:[^\x0A\x0D +]))|))*\s*\)\s*))*)))),

, which is how RJS had to write the regex for it, and even this is dodgy. I try to get electronic communication done with any other medium, but how do I convince people that the best way to do this is to put the master document on our own site and then link to that rather than sending out 60 copies of a document that you can't change once it goes out?

To summarize, how would you convince good people to use an alternative to google hosting and to use their own site instead of sending a zillion email attachments?

We will survive Mad Vlad together,

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Google scripts, google, and email
by hippo (Bishop) on Oct 10, 2022 at 11:20 UTC
    If you were part of a group that names anonymity as the foundation of all its traditions, what would you say to keeping master records with google as opposed to our own darn site?

    You could just point them to https://killedbygoogle.com/ and then ask them what they'll do when all their data suddenly vanishes. If that isn't a sobering thought for them then perhaps they shouldn't be involved in decisions such as this in the first place. And that's even before you consider the data-mining aspect.


    🦛

      Nice… and uncanny how much of it I played around with and didn’t even know was gone. Zeitgeist alone retired in 2007. News to me. Say… good news, really. Google has largely wormed its way out of my life with that graveyard. They had the hooks in really deep at one point.

        The service I miss the most is "Google Code Search", I found it an extremely useful way for google to pay back to the OS community. (shame on them)

        Not sure in which way "Google Site Search" died, heavyweights like the guardian newspaper and perlmonks still have customized searches using google.

        And in all fairness it's also a graveyard of many experimental services which aimed to attack similar competitors and those markets are very "highlander'ish". No wonder they died after loosing the fight.

        For instance: I organized meetings with my old schoolmates (communications, reunion pics, address database, etc ) with "Yahoo! Groups", a glorified mailing list with boards and upload areas.

        Reason was that Yahoo was too dumb to monetize our data, but on the other side too big to fail. This strategy worked for 15 years, till they shut down.

        Now I'm very reluctant to move that stuff to FB.

        Cheers Rolf
        (addicted to the 𐍀𐌴𐍂𐌻 Programming Language :)
        Wikisyntax for the Monastery

      Ok, thx, hippo. That's a good start. What I'm finding as I knock the cobwebs off scripts is that I had left things unfinished, and the problem with my heavily-google-dependent scripts was that I hadn't loaded the data, so google didn't have a response.

      Another variety of google coming up with weird things is like this:

      fritz@laptop:~/Documents$ ./1.lys.pl Subroutine get_logger redefined at ./1.lys.pl line 47. INFO: ./1.lys.pl INFO: return from the google is -30 meters INFO: Lysychansk on 2022-10-11T03:22:31 (1665476551 seconds unix-epoch +) timezone: -0500 (lat: 38.4324101, lon: 48.9207881) at height -28 m +eters INFO: Object Azimuth Elevation INFO: Jupiter 19.4268573032889 -50.7078930524939 INFO: Moon 336.298782353501 -36.1827200711628 INFO: Saturn 79.8122077165904 -38.9955330829549 INFO: return from the google is 821 meters INFO: in the 'Ho on 2022-10-11T03:22:31 (1665433351 seconds unix-epoch +) timezone: +0700 (lat: 43.61, lon: -116.2) at height 823 meters INFO: Object Azimuth Elevation INFO: Jupiter 36.2621632578313 -41.0584802357843 INFO: Moon 1.03055134306704 -36.9777514240792 INFO: Saturn 86.7497259872478 -27.6215597186519 fritz@laptop:~/Documents$

      bliako may differ with me, but I think it is within their reach to have a valid number for the altitude of this hill, but they don't publish it so as not to be used the people who are targeting civilians, as they did today with approximately 85 missiles.

      Script here for interested parties:

      I'm still curious about the question of whether an email from Berlin to Moscow goes through. Does anyone know? (I'm fresh out of people in Moscow I talk to. Hi Ed, if you read this.)

      Also, can someone enumerate instances of google misusing people's information or the potential to do so? I talk about needing to have some rapport/realpolitik with giant evil corporations, but this is a step too far for me.

      Is there a treatment out there from sysadmins about why an organization should have one document on a secure site and send out links to that one secure document as opposed to sending it as a mass email attachment where 60% of the recipients have no context for it whatsoever?

      Do well-intentioned people create a polluted digital spam ocean by sending mass email with attachments?

        I'm still curious about the question of whether an email from Berlin to Moscow goes through. Does anyone know?

        Schrödinger famously said that a sent email is in a superposition of both received and unreceived states until the intended recipient actually looks in their inbox*.

        An email might get through. I can confidently assert that more than 0% and less than 100% of the emails sent from any city to any other city will arrive successfully at their intended destination in an uncorrupted form.

        * I'm paraphrasing, of course.


        🦛

        Do well-intentioned people create a polluted digital spam ocean by sending mass email with attachments?

        I spoke recently with a local deli owner who apologetically explained to me that she had recently been working to reduce her carbon footprint, and as part of that process was avoiding replying to emails except where strictly necessary. That prompted me to look into the carbon cost of email, on which subject there is quite a lot of information.

        A lot of that is based on the first (2010) edition of How Bad are Bananas by Mike Berners-Lee (brother of Sir Tim), but the figures were substantially revised with more up-to-date information in the 2020 edition. See for example the carbon cost of an email.

        This may be an angle - either as "carbon cost" (for the planet) or as "energy cost" (for the bills) - by which to argue your point.

        I'm still curious about the question of whether an email from Berlin to Moscow goes through. Does anyone know?

        An email from a major provider (gmail, etc) is much more likely (in many circumstances) to make it past spam blocks and other blocks than emails from "lesser" servers. An email from your ISP's mail host may be more or less or equally likely to make it through than one from a self-hosted mailserver, depending on how well those servers are set up (getting SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and the other such settings right can be difficult).

        But when you are talking about emails crossing political borders that involve international tensions, there are likely a lot of other factors completely out of your control. Asking us to tell you whether it will get through or not is not necessarily helpful to you, as our experience in such matters may vary from yours. (Personally, I have not knowingly tried to email someone in Moscow, so I cannot give an anecdote, helpful or otherwise.)

Re: Google scripts, google, and email
by davies (Prior) on Oct 10, 2022 at 09:41 UTC
    Q2) If you were part of a group that names anonymity as the foundation of all its traditions, what would you say to keeping master records with google as opposed to our own darn site?

    I could tell you, but I don't think you're old enough for that sort of language.

    As far as email is concerned, I run my own servers. I've built them at work & helped a friend do the same. It's not that hard and, for me, runs very comfortably on a Pi 1 with 256Mb RAM. If you want help on this, I'll gladly do my best.

    Regards,

    John Davies

      I could tell you, but I don't think you're old enough for that sort of language.

      I think a lot of our attitudes regarding data usage line up with our ages. At 56 belly-button years old, I was lucky to be introduced to computers at a relatively-young age, 12. I have the experience of doing telnet, and I thought I could always return and "do things from scratch." I used to love autoexec.bat. I miss the days of bulletin boards and usenet, comp.lang.c, comp.lang.perl.misc. After the Perlpocalypse, I checked out the latter, and it was the saddest post from Keith Thompson about whether the lights were on. (They're not) Gone like the hogshead, cask, and demijon. "Kids nowadays" seem profligate in their data consumption to me who wants to count his bytes by the packet.

      As far as email is concerned, I run my own servers. I've built them at work & helped a friend do the same. It's not that hard and, for me, runs very comfortably on a Pi 1 with 256Mb RAM. If you want help on this, I'll gladly do my best.

      Well, John, I was glad to see this response because I'd like to get back on track with finishing it off. This is gonna be long enough that I'm gonna put the rest in readmore tags to reserve vertical space for respondents:

      Less the gory details, my questions are:

      Q1) Is gitlab a better source host than github (or google)?

      Q2) How do I silence the mail queue?

      Q3) Should I substitute sammy for root in the above?

      Q4) What does /etc/aliases look like on a working install?

      Thanks all for comments,

        I, too, have referred to the debian.org document to which you link. I have spent more time linking to https://samhobbs.co.uk/2013/12/raspberry-pi-email-server-part-1-postfix, which is a bit dated. I have written my own guide which works for me. If you (or anyone else) /msg me an email address, I'll gladly send you a copy with a few caveats.

        Q1) Is gitlab a better source host than github (or google)?

        How long is a piece of string? Everything is a compromise and it must depend on how those compromises fit your use case. If you are trying to build a library of code for a CV, Github is where people will start looking. I run my own server, turned off most of the time, using gogs https://gogs.io/, which ISTR is available on apt.

        Q2) How do I silence the mail queue?

        If by "silence" you mean "purge obsolete entries", sudo postsuper -d ALL is another option.

        "It seemed to me I needed "someone" dedicated to being the mailchimp, who is not in the sudo group" is not my experience.

        Q3) Should I substitute sammy for root in the above?

        I'm not sure. I have a dedicated Pi running postfix, so root and any "boss" user of postfix are essentially the same, so I haven't had to work through your problem.

        3.1 - Unattended upgrades

        Raspbian (or whatever it's called now) comes with this set up by default. The file contains lots of comments, removed below:

        dr@mail:~ $ cat /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades Unattended-Upgrade::Origins-Pattern { "origin=Debian,codename=${distro_codename},label=Debian-Securi +ty"; }; Unattended-Upgrade::Package-Blacklist { };

        3.2 /etc/hosts

        dr@mail:~ $ cat /etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 localhost mail ::1 localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback ff02::1 ip6-allnodes ff02::2 ip6-allrouters 127.0.1.1 mail

        Q4) What does /etc/aliases look like on a working install

        dr@mail:~ $ sudo cat /etc/aliases [sudo] password for dr: # See man 5 aliases for format #postmaster: root postmaster: dr root: dr

        Regards,

        John Davies

        Q1) Is gitlab a better source host than github (or google)?

        Yes, because it isn't owned by a malignant corporation and because it's open source.

        Q2) How do I silence the mail queue?

        You don't want to silence it, you just want to remove the messages which are stuck in the queue and will never be delivered. qtool.pl is probably best for this.

        Q3) Should I substitute sammy for root in the above?

        You could if someone is going to be sure to read sammy's email. So long as someone is getting and reading the postmaster emails it can be any user.

        Q4) What does /etc/aliases look like on a working install?

        I'm not sure what you mean by this. The format is as described in the man page. Are you asking for someone to post an in-production aliases file?


        🦛

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