It is quite easy to email security or traffic reports automatically. We will use mpack, sendmail, and cron, but certainly the techniques could be combined with other utilities. The challenge with emailing files is that you have to encode the attachments into the email message using MIME. For the nitty gritty on MIME, see http://www.nacs.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/MIME/MIME.html. […]

First off, Pine rocks when it comes to reading mail quickly, particularly on a server where a GUI is not available. Second of all, it often doesn’t come with GNU/Linux distributions anymore. I suppose that part of the problem is that pine includes a version of IMAP that can cause problems if it coexists with […]

Outlook is nice and all, particularly when dealing with, oh, 90 percent of the email clients out there. The same thing that makes it nice, also makes it insecure. Some of the email accounts we monitor have been quite public, and receive not only a lot of spam, but also a lot of viruses. If […]

The opportunists who send unsolicited bulk email (UBE) use tools that do not follow standards. This can work to an advantage in that improper configuration can allow quite a bit of filtering to be done on inbound email. For instance, the following entries in main.cf for postfix will dramatically cut down on email from misconfigured […]

If you have a sendmail server that has a hostname that isn’t resolvable, you may need to masquerade as a different host. This is often the case if you are running sendmail on your internal workstation. We also ran into this while bringing up a Squirrel Mail web based mail system. Simply add these lines […]

There is an excellent discussion of the Blue Security DDOS attack here, including a copy of discussion from those behind the DDOS here. There is more information on Blue Frog and related issues on Wikipedia here. If you somehow missed this, it is probably in your best interest to be aware of what is going […]