Changing file associations in windows as a non administrator user

It seems that non-admin users on Windows 2000 and Windows XP can't edit their own file associations. This becomes a problem when you have a nonstandard association that needs to be in place for everyone in the office/organization. I grappled with this problem a bit, but eventually found that I could write a simple VBscript to edit the current user's registry settings to add in my own file assocations for a given extension. The code is below, simply save this script with a vbs extension (example: fileAssn.vbs) and add it as a login script for any users who need the association:

Option Explicit

Dim objShell
set objShell = WScript.CreateObject ("WScript.Shell")

'----------------------------------------------------------------
' Don't edit above here
'
' Below is an example of associating PDF files with AcroRd32.exe
' You can change this to whatever you need, and just
' copy and paste the line over again to add more associations.
'-----------------------------------------------------------------

addFileAssociation ".pdf", "AcroRd32.exe"


'-------------------------
' Don't edit below here
'-------------------------
Sub addFileAssociation( fileExt, whichApp )

If ( Left(fileExt, 1) <> "." ) Then
fileExt = "." & fileExt
End If

objShell.RegWrite "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\" & fileExt & "\Application", whichApp

End Sub

passing username to spamc through maildrop with postfix

I'm setting up a purely virtual postfix/mysql mail server, and I wanted to implement spamassassin to filter spam. Initially I had intended to use procmail, but postfix doesn't currently support procmail for virtual users, so I had to go with maildrop. All I wanted was to enable the line:

xfilter "/usr/local/bin/spamc -u USERNAME"

and have the username changed to the recipient for the mail being processed. After stumbling through some changes in master.cf and trying different maildrop variables, I found that the easiest way to get the username to the script was simply to pass ${recipient} as a parameter to maildrop in master.cf, like this:

maildrop unix - n n - - pipe
flags=DRhu user=vmail argv=/usr/local/bin/maildrop -d ${recipient} ${recipient}

(yes, ${recipient} should be there twice.) This way, I can always pull the recipient email address directly into the maildroprc file by referencing $1. So my xfilter line became:

xfilter "/usr/local/bin/spamc -u $1"

then I just fleshed out my maildroprc script (i'd post it here but it's pretty specific to my setup, and other howtos on maildrop/postfix are available) to handle what happens if a mail is tagged as spam.