There's no Place Like ::1

After several years using the mbox format on my personal email server, I decided that it was more than time to move to a better format: Maildir.

The move was triggered when I started to have real problems consulting the boxes remotely over IMAP (I use dovecot). The folders started to get messed up and the system was slow.

I always knew that maildir have clear advantages for my scenario, but I thought that I would have a hard time migrating my services and scripts. I was surprised how easy it was when I really got my hands dirty!

First, used a great Perl script mb2md to convert my existing mailboxes. Then changed some lines on my Postfix configuration. Since I do my mail processing with the Perl module Email::Filter, it was just a mater of changing the paths, and it worked magically!

Never thought it was so easy…. Oh, and dovecot now behaves correctly :-)

Goodbye mbox, you served me well…

In my quest to the perfect SMTP server for my home network, I found the next big weapon against spammers: greylisting. You can read the description on Wikipedia so I’m not extend myself here.

The technical part, if you use Postfix, is that there is a package called postgrey (apt-get install postgrey) that integrates easily with Postfix to give you a truly greylisting experience. :)

Two days ago, I was playing with DNSStuff (http://dnsstuff.com), doing some checks on my domain “0x82”. One of the tests was about some SPF thing that I never heard about.

It told me someone could send an email from anywhere, and make it appear that it was send from my domain, making it legitimate (ok, I know that this doesn’t make my email secure by himself). It told me that the solution was a SPF thing.

I’ve started reading about it, and realized that, although it seems a big hack (what? using the TXT field of a domain to store data??), it could help and protect your email. For that I needed to change the TXT record of my domain (try dig TXT 0x82.com on your console).

Then, to make sure that the email I receive is tested against this specification, I had to configure my postfix SMTP server. If you search on google for “postfix spf debian” you will find nice tutorials on how to implement that. It was really simple!