redpaw.co.uk

Contact me by email or phone regarding:

Apple Mac OSX Server
  • supply • configuration
  •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 up for it!

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

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...

iCal Sharing - Apple's Movie Demo

Good little movie from Apple's Quick Tour podcasts which demonstrates some of shared calendar and meeting functions in 10.5 iCal when combined with 10.5 Server's iCal service...

View Quick Tour iCal Server

See also the associated Directory podcast which gives a good overview of using the shared users, groups, locations and resources available for iCal meetings...

View Quick Tour Directory Application

You can download from Apple's site by right-clicking (or control-click) and 'Save as Quicktime Movie'.

Blame This Man...

Next time your email inbox gets swamped, this is the man to blame...

His name is Ray Tomlinson, and he is almost singularly responsible for the email revolution after developing in 1971 the code which enabled the sending of a message between two computers for the first time.

At first, his email messaging system wasn't thought to be a big deal. When Tomlinson showed it to a colleague, he said "Don't tell anyone! This isn't what we're supposed to be working on."

Feel free to print out his picture, pin it to the wall, and give it a stern look next time your mail application goes boing!

http://openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/home.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2000/dot_life/1586229.stm
http://www.bbn.com/about/timeline/at_sign

Shared Address Books At Last?

For longer than I care to remember I have stoically responded to that seemingly never ending question, "can we share address books on our server?". My eyes would roll upwards to heaven... "Ahh... the Holy Grail...".

Why 'no Macs' is no longer a defensible IT strategy...

Interesting article in InfoWorld which backs up the interest I am seeing from business users who had not previously considered Macs as an alternative to their Windows machines. Maybe a snowballing of  various outside pressures rather than any one reason?...

"More users are demanding Macs in the enterprise. Thanks to key computing shifts, supporting their appetite for Apple is now a straightforward option for IT"

Link to InfoWorld:  Why 'no Macs' is no longer a defensible IT strategy