Aldoblog

Managing your own e-mail server is a pain in the ass. There’s no two ways about it, when you want to take control of your own network infrastructure, you increase the complexity of the systems you manage, and you greatly increase the consequences of screw-ups. So if it’s hard work, and screw-ups mean you lose important messages, why would anyone want to run and manage their own e-mail server? For me it’s all about spam and viruses.

Daily Home Improvements: changes of addresses, a little patchwork, correcting the bounce, a change of view, a quick un-tag, and some payola for the Feds.

Daily Home Improvements: The water closet is finished, a VCR hookup, debt service ends, this blog officially moves, window washing, and undoing a previous DHI.

DHI #5 consisted of poking a hole in the firewall for Razor to access its central servers, and disabling most of the RBL blocking in sendmail, while enabling RBL checking in SpamAssassin. I also kept Rochelle from blowing up the house.

Over the course of Saturday I finished installing and configuring the minimum required software to be able to switch over to the new server for running my sites. On Sunday I swapped the IP addresses of the new and old systems, and got to work fixing the things that broke when I took the new machine live.

At the recommendation of a new co-worker, I recently installed Cloudmark’s SpamNet add-in for Microsoft Outlook, the e-mail client I’m using at Persistence. If you’re using Microsoft Outlook on Windows (as I have to at work), this tool should be a no-brainer.

A while back I wrote about a free utility called Mailfilter for getting rid of spam. I’ve since switched to something much better, an inexpensive commercial utility called Spamfire. No doubt about it, Spamfire is worth the money.

MoFo is suing a spammer for sending their employees lots of spam, and is likely to cost the spammer a lot of money. If nothing else, seeing one of their own get sued by a world-class law firm has got to put a little fear of god into those slimy spammers.

If spam in your Inbox is a problem, Mailfilter is a pretty good solution, especially if you’re using Mac OS X.

My network is down, my e-mail is bouncing. It’s making me crazy!