MailStripper - About Eridani

Eridani Star System was founded in March 1999 by Michael McConnell, a Linux enthusiast and at the time a Computer Science student, selling up-to-date Linux CDs over the Internet, and run entirely as a hobby. Soon after that, other Linux CDs were also made available, directly as a result of customer demand, and this has resulted in the list of distributions that were available.

In late 1999 Eridani launched its own Linux distribution, Eridani Linux, as a kept-up-to-date distribution loosely based on Red Hat Linux. This has been kept going until the second half of 2003, when the decision was made to stop working on Linux distributions. The last release was Eridani Linux 6.3 ("Aeryn").

Early 2001 saw the launch of an open source tool, DPager. Inspired by the web-based viewer for Demon Internet's report@gate.demon.co.uk status information, this ran as an entirely stand-alone (and rather more compact) viewer for this. Written in Tcl/Tk (a scripting language which Michael has become a bit of an enthusiast of) it was cross-platform, with Windows stand-alone binaries also available. This has now been withdrawn as Demon have withdrawn their Finger interface, which also meant this information is no longer available except through their web site.

In 2002 the volume of email spam arriving at eridani.co.uk was reaching an intolerable level, and this is what prompted Michael to investigate anti-spam solutions. Rather an impatient character at times, he tried some of the existing offerings and they either needed bleeding edge versions of MTAs (usually ones not even used here) or just didn't compile without a major system upgrade. From the ashes of screenfuls of gcc errors, MailStripper was born. And true to form it was also written primarily in Tcl/Tk.

At the time of writing, Michael is in the depths of another major website redesign for the MailStripper project, as well as working professionally as a software engineer.