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Telnet 25 – checking email connections

Posted by plattapuss on December 23rd, 2008

As I use this frequently to test remote mail hosts for one of my clients, I figure it deserves a spot here. This will allow you to manually test a remote mail server using telnet and port 25:
First get the mail server address for a website. We will use gmail.com for our example:
PLAIN TEXT
CODE:

dig gmail.com [...]

Debugging MailScanner: cleaning messages

Posted by plattapuss on December 19th, 2008

Last week I did a short post on testing MailScanner to be sure it was scanning properly. An alert reader pointed out that I missed the easy solution, which was to simply use 'MailScanner --lint' to check if MailScanner was running properly.
Since I wrote that article, I found that my MailScanner was again hogging the [...]

Test your servers Virus filters – don’t assume

Posted by plattapuss on December 16th, 2008

On one of our RHEL5 servers running Ensim, we noticed after the last big update of RHEL using 'yum update', that MailScanner was capped out, using tons of our CPU power. In the past when this happens I usually find it is ClamAV acting up. However, we were using on this server a free version [...]

Install custom Pear packages on 1and1

Posted by plattapuss on December 16th, 2008

Canadians find the weather really interesting. Don't we? I mean, after all, it changes every day from a cool -19°C in the morning to a toasty +6°C in the afternoon. Okay, so maybe not every day do we get extremes like that, But Canadians still seem fascinated with the weather.
For me, I am fascinated [...]

Email status messages – what do they mean

Posted by plattapuss on December 16th, 2008

With one of my clients I need to monitor email bounces from our mailing lists. Normally this goes relatively smoothly, as either the email goes through, or it bounces back with a 550 Recipient not found message. Sometimes the messages I get back are less familiar to me. Here is the appendix from RFC1893. Hopefully [...]