- Mail systems
- maelstrom no longer supports elm, which stopped being packaged with RedHat as of 7.3; elm is a dead project, and there is no one maintaining the source tree. Therefore, linux distributions have stopped including it. The alternatives to elm are:
- Use a POP or IMAP mailer such as Thunderbird, Outlook, or whatever you like.
- Use pine or mutt.
- Use the secure web email located at http://www.logrus.com/mail.
- Pop and Imap security
- maelstrom how supports secure transport methods for smtp, pop and imap.
- SMTP
- maelstrom supports STARTTLS over SMTP; simply turn it on in your mailer. However, some mailers will not like the fact that my key is self-signed. If this turns out to be an issue, simply contact me and I'll give you the fake CA cert that will make your mailer shut up about it.
- maelstrom supports SMTP auth using PLAIN, LOGIN and CRAM-MD5. For most people, PLAIN or LOGIN is what your mailer will want to use, and if you simply turn on SMTP AUTH and use your username/password things should work fine. Please note that these systems are not completely secure unless you also enable STARTTLS.
- For those technical folks interested in CRAM-MD5, it won't support your unix login, but I'll be happy to give you a special 'shared secret' (otherwise known as a password to everyone else) that you can use for MD5.
- maelstrom supports SMTP auth using PLAIN, LOGIN and CRAM-MD5. For most people, PLAIN or LOGIN is what your mailer will want to use, and if you simply turn on SMTP AUTH and use your username/password things should work fine. Please note that these systems are not completely secure unless you also enable STARTTLS.
- POP and IMAP
- If you have a POP/IMAP mailer that supports SSL. You may have to accept my self-signed key; this is ok, unless you don't trust me. In which case, get your mail somewhere else. =)
- SPAM
- I have autolearn scripts set up for spamassassin! Finally!
- All you have to do is create a mail directory named SPAM. It must be in uppercase. It must be in your
mail directory, i.e, /home/YOURACCOUNT/mail/SPAM. Inside that directory, create two
mail folders: spam and ham. Yes, both in lowercase. Put KNOWN GOOD mails in ham and KNOWN SPAM in spam. DO NOT JUST REDIRECT MESSAGES THAT SPAMASSASSIN TAGS AS SPAM TO SPAM. That will actually reduce spamassassin's effectiveness. However, if you put messages that you KNOW to be good and messages that you KNOW to be spam in each directory, it will increase the effectiveness. Especially put mis-tagged messages in the ham directory. If you make an error, just move a message from one box to another, and spamassassin will fix it. It's very nice about it.
- the learn script only runs once a day, so you won't notice any immediate change, but over time it should miss fewer and fewer spams, and incorrectly tag fewer and fewer spams if you keep an eye out for mistakes and move them appropriately.
- You won't get any information about what it's doing, but it will email a log file to me every night so if you ask me I can confirm that you have things set up properly to work.\
- All you have to do is create a mail directory named SPAM. It must be in uppercase. It must be in your
- SPAM FILTERING
- These are the filters I use for spam, using procmail; they are great with any IMAP mailer or pine, but if you're just using POP they are a bit problematic. Just put this at the end of your
.procmailrc# mail directory shortcut
MAILDIR=$HOME/mail # Default mail directory# --------- SPAM FILTER ----------
:0:
* ^X-Spam-Level: \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*
"$MAILDIR/SPAM/High Score Spam"
:0:
* ^Subject:.*\[SPAM\]
"$MAILDIR/SPAM/Low Score Spam":0:
* ^X-Spam-Level: \*\*\*\*
"$MAILDIR/SPAM/Probable Spam":0:
* ^X-Spam-Level: \*\*\*
"$MAILDIR/SPAM/Possible Spam"
- SMTP
- Backups
- When I have some time, I will implement a backup system that will backup the home and system directories to a second hard drive in the machine. This is a moderately good backup, as it will defend us against data loss from a head crash (the most common reason for data loss). It won't do us much good if a piano or a 9.6 earthquake falls on the box, however. So if you're concerned about that, keep second level backups somewhere. I hope to have this implemented in the next couple of weeks. No really, I'll do that on this upgrade. Well, I need another box for storage.
- Web Space
- The new apache server now supports SUEXEC, which means that any web CGI you might have will run with YOUR permissions. This is both a blessing and a curse; for instance, SUEXEC doesn't like to run symlinks. Sorry, I can't fix this, believe me I tried. You'll just have to create a CGI that calls another CGI in its place. For another, it will run with YOUR permissions, but it's a little picky about how it will accept the permissions.