crazylazy.info

Why to hate typical Unix mailserver setups

I hate that stuff - and it's not that Postfix in particular sucks. But integrating with Postfix is absurd. Surely it works, and as long as it works nobody changes that stuff on how it's designed.

Even deploying an SSL/TLS setup is challenging. But no, you also need to install proper authentication. Locally, Postfix (for unknown reasons) is chrooted. People think that this is a security feature.

Who needs this?

Yay, free mails in a sustaining setup!

This is a tutorial on how to practically setup a relatively secure mail-server.

It's supposed to be as minimal as reasonable nowadays, and for a small amount of users (standard root server, max. ~20 mail-users at once). Without a real DB backend. It doesn't scale business-needs, however it's supposed to be extendable.

The reference system this setup works with is a Debian GNU Linux with:

• Maildrop - instead of Procmail for more flexible filter rulesets
• Postfix and Postfix-pcre ~ 2.7

Modern GUIs need Drag and Drop

The following is an example for a drag & drop action with PyQt4. It uses paramiko for SSH interactions. I'm well aware that it won't work on Windows that way. But that's a Windows problem. I'm also well aware that there's a password in this file. Give it a try.
The source is at GitHub. The indention seems to be broken there. But that's a GitHub problem. It seems to be broken here, too. But that's a Drupal problem. ;). Actually it isn't even a problem.

Just the imports. The os module is necessary if you want paramiko to use your private ssh-key. The sys module is needed due argv:

mutt meets the cloud

mutt is a pretty decent terminal based mail-client. It reliably runs on almost every platform, is RFC conform by default, lightweight, fast, extremely versatile and sweet as leet. In order to take advantage of all the kewl features of Gmail many people use heavyweight mail-clients like Mail.app (>300 MB), Outlook (infinite waste of space and time), or Thunderbird (the compromise).
In the past mutt was just a MUA, but since ~ 1.5 there's a useable smtp, imap and pop3 backend. In the following I hacked mutt to sync with multiple Gmail imap accounts to use the great filters and infinite space - from a terminal. Just mutt and Gmail.

About IT security and more

hey guess what: the trojan horse has got a black hat :)

The conference material at BH is always kewl. Attending to this con is highly expensive because it's far away - in my case. Well... here's the material publicly available. For personal entertainment: Follow this link.

Highlights for the moment Read more »

old DDR customs official's watchtower

There's no censorship in free democratic states?

The Federal Republic of Germany begins to restrict information access for its citizens (again) - in the uttermost dubious and ineffective way. Due consistent lack of technical knowledge and unnatural high resistance against arguments freedom of speech is about to cease to exist. Within the borders where some time ago poets, thinkers and libertines had a right to simply express themselves, those troublemakers nowadays are to be silenced.

funny japanese wireless toilet control (source)

I just thought - because there's enough to read for everybody in IT security at the moment: keep this short and just list the stuff with some tiny little annotations.