Mail is one of the hardest services to manage. Actually, mail is pretty simple in and of itself: there’s protocols people use to access their mail (such as IMAP and POP), protocols used to communicate between mail servers and send mail (SMTP, SMTPS) and then there’s a database of mail and user information. In macOS Server 5.2 for Sierra, all of these are represented by a single ON button, so it really couldn’t be easier. But then there’s the ecoysystem and the evil spammers. As the former systems administrator of a large number of mail servers, I firmly believe that there is a special kind of hell where only spam is…
-
-
Mail Chapter of Take Control of OS X Server Now Available
The Mail Server chapter of the Take Control book is now available up on http://tidbits.com/article/14950. I’m always torn when it comes to writing chapters on setting up mail servers. Is it socially irresponsible to help people potentially (but accidentally) create spam bots…
-
Setting Up The Mail Service in Mountain Lion Server
Mail is one of the hardest services to manage. Actually, mail is pretty simple in and of itself: there’s protocols people use to access their mail (such as IMAP and POP), protocols used to communicate between mail servers and send mail (SMTP, SMTPS) and then there’s a database of mail and user information. In Mount Lion Server, all of these are represented by a single ON button, so it really couldn’t be easier. But then there’s the ecoysystem and the evil spammers. As a systems administrator of a large number of mail servers, I firmly believe that there is a special kind of hell where only spam is served at…
-
The Danger of RBLs
So ordb.org has been dead for awhile. If you had an inactive server that was using ordb.org as your Realtime Black-List server on that box and you bring it back up then you won’t accept email from anyone any more. Reason being is that every time your server goes to receive an email and does a lookup on an RBL if it cannot reach the RBL then it will receive no email. Furthermore if your server cannot communicate with the RBL server then you will reject mail. So while RBLs will save you from massive amounts of spam they can actually be used to attack your server. For example, the…