Softball is one of my favorite sports. I don’t have to spend hours training and practicing, and that really helps with my busy schedule these days. This is actually like my 8th season in the last 10 years, and it is something that has grown into a summer tradition for me.

It all started in Jr High and High School watching my dad play on our church’s softball team. Our whole family would go to the games to watch and cheer him on. He usually played SS, and was a really good one. Once I turned 16 I was old enough to play and I jumped at the chance. Because I was speedy I got to play in the outfield, and over the years that has been my primary position, with a little bit of SS thrown in (just to be like dad).

This year’s softball season is a little bit different for me because I am the player/coach. I am enjoying coaching, though it has changed where I have been playing on the field. I still have good speed/skills as an outfielder, but because that is so far away from the play, I have changed to play catcher. Surprisingly, I have really enjoyed the position. Before the season started I had played catcher a little bit in the past, but only sparingly. Now I find that it is the position that I gravitate towards. I still really enjoy being an outfielder, but I think I enjoy being a catcher just as much.

I will admit because I still find this a little bit strange. Ordinarily catcher is seen as one of the “protected” positions, i.e. where you put weaker players. However, I have noticed that in this season having a dependable catcher has helped out alot as we have had many close plays at home.

So far this has been an enjoyable softball season, and I am enjoying playing catcher…. strange.

Friends of mine who have used qmail have always extolled the virtues of qmail’s alias system. My understanding is that with qmail, if you have an address, say bob@example.com, you can also receive email at bob-*@example.com. So, instead of having an alias for each bob-slashdot@…, bob-hp@… like you do in postifx, you can just use them. This seemed like a neat feature to me, and I was bummed that I didn’t have this feature in postfix…. that is until now.

After doing some more google searching on the topic of “postfix qmail aliases” and “postfix wildcard aliases” I came upon the postfix configuration parameter ‘recipient_delimiter’. It seems that if you set recipient_delimiter to something like a + or a -, it acts in a very similar way to how qmail works. So now I have set my recipient_delimiter, I can now use bob-test123@example.com. (Of course with my own domains.)

I think this is a great feature, and one that will save me lots of editing of my aliases file for all of the lists that I like to subscribe to. Plus, it will allow me to continue to sort my email based on the destination address.