redpaw.co.uk

Welcome to redpaw.co.uk - your personal Apple Mac server and network consultant.

Contact me by email or phone regarding:

Apple Mac OSX Server
  • supply • configuration • support
  •installation • management

Internet Connectivity
  • ADSL • wireless modems
  • Firewalls • VPNs

Network Connectivity
  • cabled networks
  • wireless networks

For those outwith my main client base of Glasgow & Edinburgh (UK), travel is generally not a problem, particularly if the sun is shining and the Ducati is fueled!

If preferred, remote assistance is available for user-installs and configuration.

David Brown - Apple Certified Technical Coordinator & Apple Mac Consultant
Email: see link below logo        Phone: 0141 334 8827

Attachments Folders in Apple Mail

Individual email messages contain all data and info about their attachments. However, Mail also recreates the attachments in an associated Attachments folder and uses this as a cache to speed up any subsequent access to an attachment. These cached Attachment folders can consume quite a bit of space (mine total 1.8G) and old ones in particular could be deleted without any repercussions. Personally, I wouldn't bother just to free up disk space but I did find one Mail client which seemed to have got itself confused and ended up with many unnecessary cached folders. Deleting all the Attachment folders was the easiest way to clean things up. The following Terminal commands can be used to report on existing Attachments folders and  delete them if required.

Amavisd Suicide Trouble

Applies to: OS X Server 10.6 running junkmail and virus scanning.

 

Symptoms

Incoming and outgoing mail is not passing through the mail server and your mail queue (in Server Admin's Mail Maintenance tab) is growing and growing.

Looking at the mail.log, you see continuous "deferred" messages...

postfix/smtp[3738]: BAEDC948DF72: to=<reddi@redpaw.co.uk>, relay=127.0.0.1[127.0.0.1]:10024, delay=43, delays=0.47/0/43/0, dsn=4.4.2, status=deferred (lost connection with 127.0.0.1[127.0.0.1] while receiving the initial server greeting)

The System.log also shows a rather more worrying message...

org.amavis.amavisd[3789]: Suicide () TROUBLE in pre_loop_hook: db_init: BDB no dbS: __fop_file_setup:  Retry limit (100) exceeded, File exists. at (eval 55) line 309.

And the amavisd.log repeats this error (without the melodramatic Suicide reference) and with a previous log line referencing the Berkeley database...

/usr/bin/amavisd[3789]: Creating db in /var/amavis/db/; BerkeleyDB 0.36, libdb 4.6
/usr/bin/amavisd[3789]: (!!)TROUBLE in pre_loop_hook: db_init: BDB no dbS: __fop_file_setup:  Retry limit (100) exceeded, File exists. at (eval 55) line 309.

There are different variations to the error messages but they will typically refer to accessing the Berkely DB (BDB).

Google Mail - Tips For Viewing Messages

When accessed via a browser, Google Mail has a restricted number of visible messages 'per page'. It's a pain to browse older messages as you have to wait for the page to refresh.

The following might be helpful...

Why are my 10.5 Server Vacation Responses Being Rejected by my Relay Server?

Symptoms:

Your email vacation notices are not being received by recipients. If you look in your server's mail.log you see that outbound vacation notices are showing a rejection by your relay server...

Viewing And Modifying SpamAssassin's AWL Auto-Whitelist in 10.5 Server

SpamAssassin in OS X 10.5 Server maintains a dynamic auto-whitelist (AWL) of email senders. The AWL modifies the calculated spam scores for incoming and outgoing email according to the previous history of emails from that sender.

Sometimes you may want to modify the AWL entry for a sender. For example, if a sender has been forwarding junk mail to the junkmail user (for spam training) rather than redirecting it then they will be flagged as the sender and not the real original sender. This will cause the local user's AWL score being moved up towards spam-sender territory and may even result in outgoing mail from that user being tagged as spam by their own email server. This would be evident by looking at the AWL score in a sent message header.

There are a couple of SpamAssassin commands for modifying AWL entries for the above scenario (but see The Modification Problem section before use)...