My Macinations

Finally, Microsoft follows the industry standards and has a reasonable mail service. It is now possible to use the POP protocol to send and receive email from hotmail.

Instructions for Apple’s Mail application on Leopard:

In Mail go to Preferences, and click on Accounts

Click the plus button (lower left) to add a new account

In the Add Account panel, enter your Name and your hotmail (or live) email address and your password and click ‘Continue…’

In the ‘Incoming Mail Server’ panel select ‘POP’ from the Account Type menu, and give the account a description

You must fill in the following information correctly:

Incoming Mail Server: pop3.live.com
Username: Your Hotmail address (with @hotmail.com, @live.com extension included)
Password: Your Hotmail password
Click on Continue

Set the Outgoing Server to smtp.live.com, then click Continue, and click ‘Create’.

On the other hand, I use PowerMail instead of Mail, which makes things a little more interesting.

In PowerMail do this:

From the Setup menu select ‘Mail Accounts…’
In the ‘Mail Accounts’ panel, click the ‘New’ button on the top left.
Give the account a description.

Under the ‘Identity’ tab, enter your hotmail email address and your name.

Under the Receiving tab:
Protocol: POP3
User account ID: your complete hotmail/live address
Incoming mail server: pop3.live.com
check the save password box and enter your password.
Under Advanced, check the ‘Use secure connection (SSL/TLS) box and make sure the ‘On a dedicated secure port’ radio button is selected.

Under the Sending tab:

Outgoing SMTP server: smtp.live.com
check the Authenticate as user box and enter your full email
password: your hotmail password.

Under ‘Advanced’ check the ‘Use secure connection (SSL/TLS) box and make sure the ‘Using the STARTTLS command’ radio button is checked.

With Leopard 10.5.1, Apple’s developers changed the default status of html files downloaded from the internet from ‘safe’ to ‘Unsafe’.

While this may make sense from a security standpoint, for somebody like me that processes hundreds of html files downloaded every day, it’s a big annoyance.

I filed a bug with Apple, asking for a workaround. I was hoping that they would implement a preference somehow to enable me to either override the default settings or allow me to specify trusted servers.

Tonight, three months later, I received an answer and the workaround that I was looking for.

I turned out that you could have a user specific file to override the system’s default settings. The file is not there normally, so you would need to create it. It is:

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.DownloadAssessment.plist

The contents of the file need to be:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>LSRiskCategorySafe</key>
	<dict>
		<key>LSRiskCategoryContentTypes</key>
		<array>
			<string>public.html</string>
			<string>public.xml</string>
			<string>public.php-script</string>
			<string>com.microsoft.windows-media-wmv</string>
		</array>
		<key>LSRiskCategoryExtensions</key>
		<array>
			<string>xhtml</string>
		</array>
	</dict>
</dict>
</plist>

Download Sample File

Hopefully that helps somebody else with this type of problem.

If you need to change the settings of other file types, here are the system-declared file types:

System-Declared Uniform Type Identifiers

For each type you add another <string></string> item to the above array.

For example, for jpeg2000 files you add:

	<string>public.jpeg-2000</string>

Right below the other <string> line in the first array.

To declare files by extension, you add:

	<string>odf</string>

Right below the other <string> line in the second array.

Leopard brings one big change to web developers working with Apache, PHP and Mysql on the Mac. Apache 2 comes with Leopard along with PHP 5.

Here is what to do to restore a test environment.

First, you need to enable PHP.

Apache’s .conf file moved from /private/etc/httpd/httpd.conf to /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf

Open this file with your favorite text editor and uncomment the line:

# LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

You don’t need to add the mime type for php, because it’s already done for you under leopard. The last line in the .conf file is:

Include /private/etc/apache2/other/*.conf

The ‘other’ directory contains a .conf file for php5. That takes care of the mime type and the index.php configuration for php sites.

If you develop multiple sites and you need virtual hosting functionality, scroll down to the end of the .conf file and uncomment the following:

# Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

That’s all the modification that I had to make to to the httpd.conf file.

Next, you’ll need to setup whatever virtual hosts you have in the virtual hosts file /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

For example, for each line that you set up in your hosts file like so:

beta-site-1.com 127.0.0.1

You need to make an entry in the httpd-vhosts.conf file like so:

<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerName beta-site-1.com
   ServerAlias www.beta-site-1.com
   ServerAdmin webmaster@beta-site-1.com

   DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/beta-site-1"
   ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/Library/WebServer/beta-site-1/cgi-bin"
   <Directory "/Library/WebServer/beta-site-1">
     Options FollowSymLinks MultiViews Includes
     AllowOverride All
     Order allow,deny
     Allow from all
   </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

One good thing is that the ‘upgrade’ install of Leopard does not mess with your hosts file, so whatever virtual domains you may have set up won’t be affected.

If you had Mysql installed previously, good news too, Leopard’s installer won’t touch it. I found mysqld running just like before the upgrade.

One thing changed with Leopard is the socket for Mysql. It moved to /private/tmp, so you may need to configure your php.ini file to point it to the new location.

To do so, open the file ‘/private/etc/php.ini‘, (if no such file exists, then make a copy of ‘/private/etc/php.ini.default‘ naming it ‘php.ini‘) and edit that.

You have two lines to modify:

mysql.default_socket =

becomes:

mysql.default_socket = /private/tmp/mysql.sock

and mysqli.default_socket =

becomes:

mysqli.default_socket = /private/tmp/mysql.sock

of course, from the sharing pref pane, stop the server and restart it and voila!