Eliza (Eliza)
When the requirement came up for a mailing list manager, I went with Mailman due to it's widespread popularity. This post is an overview of installing Mailman on an Ubuntu/Postfix set-up and managing Mailman lists.
In a nutshell I followed Ubuntu Community Documentation Mailman guide; in particular to how to configure Mailman for Postfix. In this instance, the server was already configured with the necessary prerequisties. Installing Mailman was a matter of installing the package from the Ubuntu repositories then providing configuration specific to Postfix.
WebDAV is an extension of the HTTP protocol that allows access and synchronisation of files on a web server. The required Apache modules (dav_fs and dav) are available if WebDAV access is required.
For example one common application for WebDAV is remote calendaring. This example explains how to configure WebDAV for Ubuntu server using basic authentication.
In all of the efforts to blacklist to keep the nasties out, there may become the need to whitelist particular hosts or IPs in Postfix.
The error which led me whitelisting was similar to the error from the postfix log file:
Virtual mailboxes allow the mail server to house e-mail accounts for users without requiring a user account on the system. Instead of delivering mail to a user account, mail is delivered into a special directory configured in the Postfix configuration file. Courier mail sits as a layer on top of Postfix which allows a user to authenticate and connect to their virtual mailbox.
Creating the directory structure
In addition to my previous post on Configuring Postfix virtual domains, Postfix can be configured to relay mail to a person that doesn't have an account on the server to their personal e-mail address (eg to a GMail address) by creating an alias for that person.
Similarly to my previous post, values for virtualaliasdomains and virtualaliasmaps should be entered in the Postfix configuration file. In the Postfix virtual file simply point the virtual alias to an external e-mail address eg:
A virtual domain is when a server hosts multiple domain names which all point to the same IP address. Virtual domains are relatively easy to set up in Postfix.
In this post I will speak of Virtual alias domains which simply expands the number of domains Postfix delivers mail to. This solution assumes the user has a user account on the system.
In addition to my previous post on Setting up a Postfix mail server on Ubuntu, I will now discuss some techniques for securing the mail server. This is not an exhaustive discussion on mail server security, but a rundown on some of things I believe are important to consider. There's a nice little initialism for what we are going to be talking about: UCE (Unsolicited commercial e-mail).
A bit of background info: A MTA is an acronym for Mail Transfer Agent which is the software that works behind the scenes to deliver mail. A computer running an MTA may be referred to as a mail server.
The MTA in discussion is Postfix, a popular open source MTA for Unix/Linux-like systems. Here I cover the basics of getting Postfix up and running on Ubuntu, similar to the guide on the Howto on the Ubuntu community site (PostFixBasicSetupHowto) as these are some of the steps I followed, plus I will eventually expand on to some other mail related topics. In summary, I will explain how Postfix, Courier Mail and Squirrelmail is installed. Some further background information: Courier Mail is a layer on top of Postfix that provides POP3 and IMAP support and is a popular combination with Postfix. Squirrelmail is a web mail interface.
Here is the video I created and uploaded of my Linux desktop to YouTube. The demo is of my desktop running World of Warcraft and Compiz-Fusion under Linux with an nVidia Geforce Go 7600 video card. There is some flicker in the video but this occurred when I boosted up the framerate in the capture, it looks better in real life :-)