DevGypsy

I’ve been interested in my health since I was a teenager, and have always looked at ways of improving my diet and workout regime. I remember as a teenager - being asked by a friend of one of my first girlfriend’s to talk to her about her diet. They were worried about her total lack of awareness on what she was consuming. It’s not like I had a super crazy diet, but back in the mid nineties I was snacking on muesli bars and carrots instead of chocolate bars and potato chips. I had also already started avoiding sugary drinks and most processed sugars.

The past couple of years i’ve been noticing i’ve had some small stomach and digestion problems. Nothing major, but as I have a natural tendency to always try and improve and fix things… I have become more and more interested in the gut biome.

Gut Biome?

I’m no expert, but as I understand it, our gut is filled with millions of bacteria all competing for resources. Obviously we want the ones which benefit and keep us healthy to flourish. I’ve read (and listened to) many articles exploring the benefits of a healthy gut biome - and I’’m all in. There are many tasty sources to ingest healthy living bacteria; Yoghurt, Kimchi, Sauerkraut, Kombucha and Miso are some of the more well known ones. I regularly eat or drink some of these - in fact, I eat kimchi, and my own home made sauerkraut every morning for breakfast. For the past 3 months, I’ve also been brewing and drinking my own water kefir!

So, Ive been a relatively happy user of Mailgun for all my transactional store and support emails and also for my newsletter blasts. When I say relatively happy, it was not without issue. I run my rails/node apps on subdomains. And with this setup, it was just not possible to configure Mailgun to send the transactional emails from the base domain. As an example, the licenses from my store were being sent with headers showing as coming from licensing.sweetpproductions.com, rather than sweetpproductions.com. This was causing issues with gmail putting license emails into users spam folders, as the mail server didn’t match correctly… While this was annoying to deal with, as an indie dev, its hard to argue with free emails… which is what Mailgun were offering. 10,000 free emails per month to be exact. So, I added a note to my store, to let users know they should check their spam folders for any misplaced emails from me…

Well, I spent the better part of 6 months in Hamburg, and it was super nice! until it wasnt. After living in australia for the past 20 years, I forgot that i just dont like the cold. And while it’s not exactly arctic cold, when it gets below around 15 degrees celcius, my body and mind just dont work. No problem I figured, Its only a few months, and I can get a whole lot of work done when im stuck inside… If only it were that easy. Luckily I had a 6 week performing contract in Macao through January - surely that would alleviate some of the winter blues. I had a super great time there, and didnt really want to go home once the contract was up. Initially i figured it was because I didnt want to leave my new friends behind. But once I arrive back in Hamburg, I remembeed the real reason I have been following the summer for the majority of my life.

So, SpamAssassin was just recently updated to v3.4.2 after a number of years of no updates. And, as I like new things - of course i would update. But after digging around in Plesk, and then also dropping down to the command line - I discovered it was not going to be a simple update. So of course I jump on DuckDuckGo to look for a solution. this is the thread I found, which was almost exactly what I needed: https://talk.plesk.com/threads/spamassassin-update-from-3-3-1-to-3-4-1.337266/.