Category computers

Hmm. So today I installed SpamAssassin 3.0. Things went good, except in the middle of everything an errant find command b0rked my vpopmail install. (Who would have thought that find . -delete -name “bayes*” would delete everything in and beneth the current directory, while find . -name “bayes*” -delete would only recursively delete all files matching ‘bayes*’.)

Anyway, vpopmail is reinstalled, SpamAssassin is doing it’s thing, etc. Except for one problem. I don’t get any spam. At all. I get messages that are flagged as not being spam, but I never ever get any flagged as spam. I’m really not sure what’s going on… SpamAssassin isn’t capable of deleting messages, and I’ve got nothing in place to ensure that the messages go away. And messages that are flagged as not being spam come through. So, I’m not sure what’s up.

One thought is that spam counts happen to be way down today (this is a distinct possibility) and that all the spam I am getting is the silly no body / no subject / no date mail, which the MTA is doing away with.

I guess the only thing to do is go home, reset the junkmail counters in Mail.app, and see if they increase over night. If I don’t get *any* spam, I’ll have to look further. Every message that I’ve expected to receive has gotten through… I just don’t have any test spam.

[UPDATE]

I’d forgotten I left this window open… In the mean time, I sent something that was apt to be flagged as spam, but it was legit. Now to figure out what’s going on…

Okay, now this is one of the most useful things I’ve installed in a long time. Google has introduced Google Desktop Search, and boy does it work well. It’s installed and picking through my email and my machine, and the searching is just great. Outlook search is notoriously faulty, taking a long time to pick through mail, being keyboard (and not context) based, etc.

Well, this tool sits there, indexes your whole machine, and offers searches on files, contents of files, email, chats, everything. It’s *exactly* what I’ve been wanting for quite some time. You know how it’s always been easier to search the internet than your local machine… Well, now searching your local machine is just as easy. This makes me really, really happy.

Does anyone here have a preferred ftp daemon that they run? I’d use the one built into FreeBSD, but I’d prefer to have something a bit more stand-alone which will do authentication on it’s own with chroot support, as I want logins with no system accounts to access only very specific directories.

I’d run Apache 2.x and use it’s ftp module, but I’m still concerned about PHP compatibility with it.

Nothing like finding what appears to be a bug in your email system at 3am. When you are tired. Too tired to fix it now.

Here’s the problem: When vpopmail (the virtual domain mail management add-in for qmail) authenticates a user via pop3 or imap, it adds an entry to a database stating that the IP address the user coming from is allowed to send mail through the server, via SMTP. This all generally works fine, except when you are checking your email via POP3 with SSL.

Then, instead of the standard line like this:

68.60.89.18:allow,RELAYCLIENT=””,RBLSMTPD=”” 1091862544

You instead get something like this:

__ffff_68.60.89.18:allow,RELAYCLIENT=””,RBLSMTPD=”” 1091861372

As the second line doesn’t work, someone with an account on my mail server won’t be able to relay mail through my mail server.

So, I’m not completely sure what’s going on as of yet. I think maybe if I update vpopmail (qmailadmin needs it as well) things will get straightened out, but we’ll have to see.

Actually, I’m now starting to think that the problem could be with my config in general. It seems I overlooked something, and I currently have qmail doing POP3, and courier doing POP3-SSL. So, I may have overlooked something when I set my mail server up way back when, and this whole time I’ve been working around the problem without knowing it, simply by having just one of my accounts check via POP3 as opposed to POP3 with SSL.

Hmm… So yeah, if this is the case, I need to figure out how to have courier make the required changes to have POP before SMTP work with it, too.

I guess I didn’t do it right instead of the first place.