Introducing rjmailer
Today I have decided that it is time to publish rjmailer, a programming project that 
I have worked with on spare time for the last two years or so. In my own view, rjmailer is the most useful piece of software I have written yet, and I have some faith that in time others will find it useful as well. Thanks to my amazing partner Alex, it even has it's own mascot and webpage to go with the release. I love you man!
rjmailer is a programming library that sends mail. There are some other pieces of software that does that, but they usually hand off their messages to the mail system and don't give much feedback to the user. rjmailer is not like that. It goes out of it's way to provide as much information as possible about the mail delivery and can in many cases give detailed and quick information about failures such as misspelled usernames or domain names.
Lets say you run a web based service that require people to register with some email address. You want to verify that the address is valid, so you send an email to the address that the user provided when signing up and require her to click a link in that message to activate your account. We're all used to this, but there are lots of things that can go wrong. The user can misspell her email address, or there can be some problem with her email server that causes the activation message to bounce. If you are unlucky you lose a member or even someone that can later be converted to a paying customer.
If that sounds interesting, please have a look at rjmailer.org. However, please be warned: this is beta software. It is not yet fully tested, has bugs and will probably lose your mail for the moment.
Filed under rjmailer | Comment (1)Sharing my work
Today I have released a piece of software that I have written as free software. It's a small library that is used to generate the information stuck to an MP3 file that tells your MP3 player what you are listening to, something called an ID3 tag. The software is mostly simple, but it uses some of the advanced CRC32 reversal stuff that I blogged about a while back, so it has some neat features if you're in the business of creating dynamic metadata to audio files stored in dynamically created zip files. My prediction would be that very few people would actually use this, but the standard ID3 generation functionality is probably useful to some.
Anyway, I'm really happy to be able to give back to the free software community, small pieces of software that I have written. My dream is to some day write a piece of software that grows it's own community around it, with other people contributing new functionality and fixes to problems. I hope that some day that dream will come true. For now it's just me publishing small parts of the software I write. Not all that bad.
For interested parties the information about my library, named id3j, is found at Voxbiblia's Free software page.
Update:
Changed the name of the released package, because of a naming collision.