Posts Tagged ‘Debian’

How to: Postfix as mail relay with greylisting support

Posted in Administration, Linux on January 28th, 2010 by Philipp C. Heckel – Be the first to comment

Greylisting is a very efficient technique for fighting spam and can reduce the spam messages in your mailbox by more than 90%. It uses the fact that most spammers only try delivering their spam-mails once, whereas real mail transfer agents (such as the ones regular e-mail service providers are using) try delivering each message up to 4-5 days before they give up.

I have always wondered why most ESPs don’t offer greylisting for their mailboxes, but only rely on less effective and resource-hungry post-retrieval filter methods. Unfortunately, my e-mail provider is one of them so that I get at least a couple of spam mails a day …

Luckily, it is very easy to set up your own mail relay with greylisting support, i.e. a mail server that simply forwards the mail to your real provider once it passes the greylist-filter.

This little tutorial describes how to set up Postfix and SQLgrey as mail relay.

read more »

GCALDaemon deb-package for Ubuntu/Kubuntu

Posted in Linux, Office, Synchronization on September 30th, 2008 by Philipp C. Heckel – 47 Comments

GCALDaemon is a great tool to synchronise many of Google’s services such as Google Calendar and Contacts with your local PC.

Unfortunately, the installation on Ubuntu/Kubuntu and any other Linux distribution is still not the most comfortable. For this reason, I sat down some hours and packed the tool into a deb-package and additionally added a nice command line tool to simplify some of the basics.

read more »

Unison 2.27.57 on Debian Etch and Ubuntu Hardy

Posted in Linux, Synchronization on May 16th, 2008 by Philipp C. Heckel – 8 Comments

The good thing about the file sync tool Unison is, that it’s available for several operating systems. This is great for groups working on different systems (Mac, Linux and Windows) but want to share and synchronize files on a remote server.

Well, the bad thing about Unison on the other hand is, that its backwards compatibility is anything but great, so that you have to make sure that everybody in the team uses the same version. And this can be tricky depending on what system you are using.

My home system is Ubuntu Hardy, the remote server system is Debian Etch. Both come with Unison 2.16.13 which would be great if not Apple’s new Leopard brings the newest version 2.27.57. Long story short, I needed the newest version on Hardy and Etch.

read more »