When migrating from an internal email system to Google Apps, it’s nice to have the option of running a pilot program including a few of your users to try it out, and then to move the rest of the users over when problems with the transition have been identified and addressed. This is pretty easy […]
Tips on Running a Google Apps Pilot
Cloudmark SpamNet
As systems administrators, we abhor spam. It bogs down servers, floods our personal mailboxes, and wastes our user’s time. As web content providers, we also are extremely annoyed that email contact information is blatently reaped and abused. The Internet can be so much more than a cesspool of spam. On the other hand, the Internet […]
Landmark Washington Spam Case Victory
As you may or may not know, Washington State has a spam law that forbids deceptive email practices. For more info on this law see this area of the Attorney General of Washington’s website. Well, a landmark case regarding this law has just been decided. We put a copy of the release up on NetAdminTools […]
Test SMTP (email) via Telnet
One good trick to use when testing your email server is to use telnet. To send email, you can just telnet into the destination email server directly: u-1@srv-1 u-1 $ telnet yourmailserver.com 25 Trying 21.40.23.46… Connected to yourmailserver.com. Escape character is ‘^]’. 220 mx.yourmailserver.com ESMTP Sendmail 8.12.9/8.12.9; Thu, 12 Jun 2003 10:06:19 -0700 helo frommail.com […]
Osirusoft Is Blocking All Hosts
Due to DDoS attacks on Osirusoft, Osirusoft decided to reject all. So, if you are using Osirusoft to block spam, stop! Well, hats off to the valiant efforts of Osirusoft. Can’t really blame them for their reaction to this world of shit. The beautiful thing is that sysadmins and others in our community will find […]
Using Watch-maillog To Reduce Spam Chatter
It is truly amazing how many resources are taken up on a server by other rogue boxes searching for an open relay, or simply sending dictionary attempts at finding local users. Watch-maillog is a perl script that uses IPtables to block mail servers that abuse your server. Watch-maillog helps with this by blocking servers that […]
Setting Reply-to Address in Pine
We often need to mail brief messages from servers to send config files, or quick messages to other sysadmins. Pine works well for this, and the installation is mostly a single binary. We usually are logged in on some account that isn’t the email address we wish replies to come to. It turns out that […]
