Switching…

As promised when delivering the DSPAM documentation I’ve finished how to setup maildrop today. I’ve got it running for a few days on my own server and I must say it works perfectly. All spam found by DSPAM is now put into a mailfolder of my choice and not in my inbox. I haven’t setup any fancy filtering yet just plain spam/nonspam filtering but it’s a start.

You can read all about how to setup maildrop in the documentation. If you have problems in using it please post your errors and problems in the forum.

Next up is to have maildrop create folders that not already exist in your inbox when needed and to have users have their own filtering rules. Hope you like it as it is currently…

I once thought about the possibility of cramming Mac mini’s into a 1U server rack and co-locate it when I had problems with my DSL connections again. Jan commented that that was impossible. Today I’ve stumbled onto an old blogpost from 2005 where someone went out and actually did it ! He crammed two mini’s and 4 disks into a 1U server rack. Now where was that screw driver, I know it was here somewhere…

After installing DSPAM again on a different machine (someone else’s) I found there where some minor errors in the install documentation. Also other people left some comments in the blog about problems they had and posted questions in the DSPAM forum.

The things I’ve changed where:

• adding the ‘sudo chmod o+x /usr/local/bin/dspam‘ command to prevent the error ‘fatal: pipe_command: execvp /usr/local/bin/dspam: Permission denied‘.
• I’ve change the DSPAM startup documentation, there was a problem with starting DSPAM if MySQL wasn’t running yet. So I set the correct dependancies in the StartupParameters.plist and now that works. I also added the complete startup scripts as a downloadable file.
• The DSPAM training script is now working without any errors, sorry about that one…

Next up is maildrop and to write a script that will take care of false negatives (mail indicated as spam that really isn’t). When that is done we’ll pickup on greylisting as that seems to be something people really want.

While installing the DSPAM software at one of the people who use my setup (yes I will help you install if the task might look to daunting for you) I considered making the training script more dummy proof. In the first version of the script you had to separate out the tagged spam from the false negatives (missed spam email) because the script didn’t separate them. But the new version does, you can just use the Junk filter in your mail program to move everything to the Junk folder and only the unidentified spam will be fed to DSPAM for retraining.

Read all about it on the script training page.

Next up will be to deliver the identified spam email into a quarantine folder which will empty all email after a certain time. As we still need to check if DSPAM was too eager in to identify regular mail as spam, although I haven’t seen this happen on my server.

Just finished writing the next part of the DSpam documentation that was needed. It still needed a proper startup and shutdown procedure. So I started in writing a shell script that would take care of it and use that in the launchd scripts which would take care of starting DSpam at boot time.

It turned out to be simpler than I thought, I only needed to uncomment: ServerPID /var/run/dspam.pid in the dspam.conf file to get a proper pid file which I could use to feed the kill command as Mac OS X hasn’t got the killproc command. When I had this figured out the rest was simple. Read the results on the starting DSpam page and use it to your liking.

I’ve decided to go public with my current version of my installation guide for DSPAM. Although it’s not quite finished and it still has some rough edges and I still need to add some features. It’s polished enough to get you a working version running on your mail-server which will eliminate quite a surprising amount of spam. You’ll need to train DSPAM to get some good results, use it a week and you’ll be amazed by it’s performance.

For instance: almost all stock selling spam (the ones with the image spam) get’s tagged as spam . If a new version of spam appears I just need to train DSPAM with a few examples and from then on they are identified as spam.

The setup I’ve currently chosen is to include DSPAM as a content filter for Postfix. This means that mail enters Postfix, is then fed through DSPAM which tags the emails and feeds it back into Postfix to have the emails delivered into the users maildir. Spam is indicated by some header tags but also the tag [SPAM] is added to the subject to be able to use a filter on my email client. DSPAM is trained by putting the missed spam messages into the users Junk folder on the IMAP server. A script that runs overnight feeds them to the DSPAM training program.

One of the features I want to add in the near future is to use maildrop to drop spam messages into the users Junk folder.

Read all about installing DSPAM using my existing mailserver setup in the documentation.

I hope you enjoy the benefits of DSPAM as well as I do.

Just got an email telling me that the XCode developers tools have been update to release 2.4.1. It’s not a major upgrade, just some small improvements and bugfixes:

• Stability and security fixes in the Xcode IDE, cctools, debugger, and compiler
• CHUD has been updated to version 4.4.3. CHUD also releases independent from the Xcode Tools releases. Current versions of CHUD can be found at: http://developer.apple.com/tools/download/
• The 10.3.9 and 10.4u SDKs have been updated.

The full release notes can be found here and you can download the tools from here (again it’s big 923 Mb)

Just upgraded my production blogs to this new release without a problem. It’s easy and painless as every upgrade of WordPress is. You can read Mark’s blog on the biggest bug fixes. Mark has also provided a zip file with all the changed files so you don’t have to upload the whole distribution, which makes it a lot easier. This release was called Ronan in honor of Ryan Boren’s new son. I guess I’ll call my next release of the documents Anna

If you run WordPress on your server you should upgrade as well…

MySQL Community Server has been updated to a new release which is mostly a bugfix release for an ABI incompatibility with earlier releases. This bug hasn’t affected me and it doesn’t really have to affect you if you don’t use this functionality, check the bug report to make sure that this is the case.

Please not that if you run the binary installer it’s still necessary to compile the source afterwards because the shared library bug isn’t solved yet. Also don’t forget to copy the data directory to the new version of MySQL or it might look like you lost all your databases.

Please note that MySQL has created a fork for the distribution. The paying customers get MySQL Enterprise Server which has been updated to 5.0.28 (don’t know why there is the difference in versions). To read more about the differentiation between the MySQL Enterprise Server and the MySQL Community Server, read Kaj Arnö’s blog.

As an added bonus I would like to point out that if you are still using the mysql extensions instead of the mysqli extensions (i stands for improved) you should take a look at the MySQL wiki article which will help you convert your application to the new module. They even got a script which will convert your source for you. If you still need convincing why you should convert please read this old article on the Zend site.

I’m working hard on the spamfilter setup using DSPAM got a basic setup working and some people are currently testing my documentation for inconsistencies or errors. When they are finished checking it all I’ll make it publicly available.

I’m a bit stuck with getting the Web GUI to work, well not exactly, it works but to know which user is using the web interface he/she needs to login. The preferred way in this setup is to use the Apache authentication methods. I tried to use mod_auth_imap which I got working on one mini but can’t get it to work on another. I really liked to use this one as it promises all the users of my server to be able to use the same user/password combination for all the services. I’ve tried mod_auth_mysql to use the postfix admin database username/password but it looks like the md5 hash encoding of the password that’s used is not the normal md5 hash one would expect. It’s not compatible with the PHP5 md5 function or anything. Courier-auth is able to handle it, I’m wondering why. If anyone has any suggestions how to tackle this issue I would be happy to hear about it.

As a bonus, I found some nice blog posts where people switched from POP3 to an IMAP mail server. Read PC World, Geir’s blog at Codehaus and Rourke McNamara’s weblog. I always liked IMAP as it stores all your email in a central location accessible from anywhere using any mail client or Roundcube.