Save Our Congress

From http://saveourcongress.izikoo.com/ :

Dear Friends, This is a time of crisis for all Americans. We stand on the verge of a major shift in political power in Congress. Republican control of the House and Senate is crucial to maintaining the progress our country has made in recent years. But all across this great nation, Republicans are in struggling in heavily contested races. The Democrats have gained traction in the media, and have become more effective at spreading their message. We need your help! We need your help to spread the message that if Democrats take control of Congress, then there will be major changes in the political climate of this nation. To illustrate the drastic actions Democrats want to take, Save Our Congress has created 3 small presentations we would like you to view. Then we need you to help spread the word. This presentation can be sent to your friends and family to encourage them to get out there on November 7th, and Vote Republican. You can also embed this presentation in your own websites and blogs. The more people who understand what is at stake, the more powerful we will become. And that will lead us to success!

If you can not view the image please click here.

Better Thunderbird and Exchange co-existance

One of the servers that I access from Thunderbird is a Microsoft Exchange server. Until today, one the things that bothered me was the mis-matched 'trash' folders. Thunderbird calls the folder "Trash" and Exchange call the folder "Deleted Items". Today I did a bit of searching on Google and found this post: (http://tinyurl.com/n68lz).

Here is the relevant section:

Omran Quaiser wrote:
> Is it possible to rename the Trash folder, because the ISP of mine
> calls it a different way. So I have got two of them, if I write my
> mails with the web-frontend.

It takes a bit of prefs.js hacking - the preference is
pref("mail.server.server1.trash_folder_name", "Deleted Items");
(Change the 1 and Deleted Items as appropriate)

Here is what I did:

1. Exited Thunderbird.
2. Made a copy of the prefs.js file (for a backup).
3. Located the section I was looking for by searching for the server's hostname.
4. Added the following line: user_pref("mail.server.server5.trash_folder_name", "Deleted Items");
5. Restarted Thunderbird and tested. Thunderbird now shows the Trash Can icon on the "Deleted Items" folder. Delete messages can now be found in the correct folder.
6. Deleted the "Trash" folder that Thunderbird had created aut0matically.

These simple steps appear to greatly improve the integration between the two applications.

Cyrus IMAP Server is case sensitive

From Mike at work:

Looks like Cyrus mail boxes have been case sensitive for some time:

From: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/download/imapd/changes.html

Changes to the Cyrus IMAP Server Since Version 1.3

• Implemented the "reconstruct -m" command, for reconstructing the mailboxes file. IMPORTANT: it is necessary to run the command "reconstruct -m" as the cyrus user after upgrading the Cyrus IMAP software from version 1.3 or earlier. We recommend you make a backup copy of the mailboxes file in the configuration directory before performing the conversion.

• Mailbox names are now case sensitive, not case insensitive. "INBOX" is the exception, and is treated as being case-insensitive.

Here is what I found the fix to be. I added the following line to imapd.conf:

lmtp_downcase_rcpt: yes

postfix queue operations and tools

Tonight I found a utility called mailq (http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2002-January/010542.html) (not quite the same as the mailq that comes with postfix). To remove the name conflict, I renamed this to mq and placed it in the /usr/local/bin directory. This utility can scan the postfix queue and report on the contents using a regex to filter the output by domain or e-mail address. Using mq with postcat (postcat -q `mq -i e-mail@domain.tld`) can be used to print the content of queued e-mails. The should be helpful for creating a web interface for monitoring the queue status. Also used with postsuper messages can be deleted (postsuper -d) or placed on hold (postsuper -h).

Use Open Source software to defend against spyware

Here's the idea:
Configure squid to block Internet access for Internet Explorer. Configure the firewall to require that all Internet web browsing go through squid. Looking at the squid documentation I see that the FAQ lists that ACLs can filter on the "User Agent" value from the browser. By blocking IE (and Outlook which uses IE to retrieve web content) from accessing all but approved sites, you could virtually eliminate adware / spyware issues from the network.

Good idea?

DocuWiki

DocuWiki combined with OOo appears to be an interesting set of tools for creating a documentation site.

Given that the Iannz DokuWiki macro works with OpenOffice.org, I would expect that it would also work with Star Office.

My bookmarks on DocuWiki: http://del.icio.us/rwsiv/docuwiki

New Items

Domain registrations - renewals due
Recipient list - recipient white list - make compatible with postfix relay_recipient_list
Web site - update
  letter of referral
  new services
Traffic reports - report overages based on configured amounts (not the current fixed amount)
Traffic reports - chi3 site
Consider having google not cache portions of the web site (http://www.google.com/webmasters/faq.html#cached)
Look at firewall settings and use (http://www.testyourvoip.com/index.html) for testing
Increase log storage

team members

Consider adding new team members and creating a news site for the web site.

web site

Of course, the web site needs to be redone.
A redirector has been setup that handles /go/ URLs. This needs to be database driven.
Get a Wiki setup for Matt.

monthly tasks

Automate the reporting of secondary DNS hosting (example):
(echo "From: User@Domain"
echo "to: Billing@Domain"
echo "subject: list of domains for CustomerDomain"
echo ""
ll | grep CustomerDomain | awk '{printf "%s\n", $9}'
) | /var/qmail/bin/qmail-inject -fUser@Domain

Automate the reporting of e-mail hosting counts.

March SPAM statistics

Here are my personal stats for the month of 3/2004:
SPAM: 13316
False Positives: 4 (Should not have been tagged as spam)
False Negatives: 226 (Should have been tagged as spam)

UMS

'admin' access controls

DNS

Figure out secondary classless reverse DNS

FTP

Setup FTP services

Reference Letters

Add new refernce letters to the web site.

monitoring

We need more monitoring!!!

UMS - Search

Add the same search and paging functionality as 'Forwards' has to 'Users'

2004/02/29 - update - completed

Site 1

Setup server 3 as a stats server.

site 3

I need to create off-site replication of the database.
I need to install additional mail servers at site 3.
I need to test remote lmtp access.

Idea

Consider using a blogger site to create a 'news' page on the main web site.