Tips, Tricks and Information for the Modern Technologist

Category: Email


Social Media and the Downfall of the Password Reset Question

There have been a number of high profile account compromises due to the insecurity of password reset questions. Examples of two big ones off the top of my head are Sarah Palin Yahoo account compromise and the Twitter “Hacker Croll” fiasco. There have been many more compromises on accounts due to weaknesses in password reset questions, even [...]


Add IP to whitelist for Postini Mail Filtering

Posted 30th April in Configurations, Email. 7 Comments

I could not find any way to see how you could add an IP address as a ‘white list’ for our Postini installation. Mails coming from our mailing list manager kept getting caught in the Postini spam interface (which is probably a whole other issue, which I will need to address later). To get Postini [...]


Outlook 2003 or 2007 Won’t Save Hosted Exchange Password

For many people using hosted Exchange services, password saving problems could plague you. That is mainly because Outlook doesn’t like it if the Exchange server’s domain doesn’t match your domain. Fortunately there is a way around this, because by the default way it is set up, you would have to enter your password every time [...]


Lyris Listmanager – Hacking the Web Frontend For Increased Functionality

Posted 18th September in Code Samples, Email, Perl, Software, TCL. 2 Comments

Lyris Listmanager is a nice mailing list management system. However, there are a few features that are missing out of the frontend that make it hard to get by your day-to-day office job. Fortunately, most of it is written with TCL routines which are not encoded, which makes for easy updates to this code. Of [...]


Remove Duplicate Email Messages in Thunderbird 2.x

Posted 5th September in Email, Programs, System Administration. 2 Comments

I used to use a Thunderbird addon to remove duplicate messages in Thunderbird. This is handy if your mail client becomes “de synced” from your mail server, whether it be an IMAP or POP3 connection. Also this can occur if you restore a backup or import mails and it creates duplicates. However, after Thunderbird 2.0 [...]


Postfix queue tools

Posted 12th January in Email, System Administration. 2 Comments

Here are a few handy items for Postfix email server users: 1. If your system is acting as a spam / antivirus / relay server for secondary internal servers, and your destination mail server is down, postfix will queue your messages to resend at a later time. In order for postfix to instantly re-queue these [...]


SMTP Errors – 550 vs 450

Posted 20th December in Configurations, Email. 7 Comments

Well I got a lesson in properly configuring your e-mail server’s error messages. Since setting up postfix as a anti-spam and anti-virus gateway for my exchange system (see my article Postfix as proxy to exchange server), I had left the option 1soft_bounce = yes enabled in my postfix configuration. This worked fine for months. However, [...]