[server-admins] Email, greylisting, and 6000+ held messages (was: Re: [Server-admins] CrossWire Server )

[Jonathan Marsden]

Peter von Kaehne wrote:

> Now I am not suggesting to re-install, but I think should the need ever
> arise, then it would be worth  bearing in mind. I am not sure about te
> situation in teh states, but I think over here Debian (or derived) is
> the predominant, with the result that most help and most documentation
> is available for it.

In the business world, I think Red Hat based distributions are probably
more commonly used.  There is plenty of information on using CentOS and
RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) for servers, and all the
business-related addons like "certification" (RHCE is probably more
widely known and respected than LPIC and UCP).  (For what it is worth, I
was somewhat involved in creating the LPIC certifications a few years
back, and held LPIC-1 until recently, when it finally expired... I
suppose I should recertify, but at the moment I can't be bothered!).

RHEL is what we currently use at work on Linux servers. Using Fedora for
a server is a slightly unusual choice, because of the shortish support
window (only 13 months) for each release, but it's not unheard of.

I think there are more pressing needs for CrossWire than changing server
distributions :)

> I suggest graylisting which would reduce the amount of actual spam. I
> am not desparately keen to try and run this, but if I were I would for
> similar reasons as Jonathan prefer Postfix - because I know it - but
> only again at the level of running a mailserver for my own house and for
> my practice - with 2 or 3 users each.

There looks to be some level of greylisting already in place on the
server, based on the existence of /etc/exim/exim-greylist.conf.inc and
its inclusion by /etc/exim/exim.conf, but I have not (yet?) read it in
enough detail to understand how (or how well) it is operating.

In case it helps, I've run sendmail-based (and more recently
Postfix-based) mailservers since 1994, and currently run Postfix for
about 120 domains and over 1000 mailboxes as part of my day job.  I
don't currently run any mailing lists, but I used to in the past (maybe
200 lists or so).

While on the subject of CrossWire email, there are currently over 6000
held messages (mostly spam, based on a more-or-less random sampling!) on
the server in /space/mailman/data/ .  Some of them date back to 2004.  I
would recommend that whoever in the admin team knows mailman and has
appropriate privs could look at pruning them (they probably are not
doing anyone any good!), and also check out why they are piling up like
this :)

Could whoever manages the JIRA bugtracker at http://crosswire.org/bugs
please set up a "Server Admin" category so we can track issues there?
Or, is there a better way to track server admin issues among the several
people with admin privs and/or interest in helping?  Configuring it so
that category was only visible to the people on this list would be wise,
from a security perspective.  Also archives of this list should probably
not be public (they currently appear to be public).

Jonathan