In summary, he told me that because of the recent FRCP (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) changes, he knew his company needed to be better about keeping full archived of all their email. It’s not enough to have nightly backups to disk or tape. He said, “What if I received an email from a customer and then delete the email. By the time the nightly backups run, that email will have come and gone. We needed something more thorough.”

He told me that in their mail server, they have the option to send all mail to a specific address. This would include all mail coming to their users, as well as mail that is sent from their servers. They decided to send a copy of all mail to macmini@businessdomain.com. Then, on the Mac mini they have in our data center, they have an account in Mail that is set up with POP retrieval of that email address. So everything is downloaded from the server and stored on the Mac mini in our data center. He also has that Mac mini cloned to an external drive here.

He said that there are a lot of other options out there for archiving mail, but he chose this option for three reasons.

First, the mail will be stored on their own hardware so they know it’s available and no one else has access to the email history.

Second, Using Mail.app gives you the benefit of spotlight searches. One of the new rules according to the FRCP is that the data should be searchable so quick and easy retrieval is possible for civil litigation.

Finally, he chose this way so hid email archives would be in a different physical location than his email server. He didn’t want his email server to also act as the archive to avoid loss from fire, theft, etc.

He also uses the Mac mini for archiving iChat transcripts in a similar way.

If you’re a business owner, it’s become quite critical to pay attention to data retention. Google has provided two great white papers on the FRCP changes and how best to align your company with the new guidelines. (I’ve made both available in a zip file here.)

• Snow Leopard Server follows up with the next major release of iCal Server, which includes group and shared calendars, push notifications, the ability to send email invitations to non-iCal Server users, and a browser-based application that lets users access their calendars on the web when they’re away from their Mac.
• Snow Leopard Server brings unrivaled support for multicore processors with “Grand Central,” a new set of built-in technologies that makes all of Mac OS X Server multicore aware and optimizes it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors.
• Mail services have been enhanced to include server-side email rules and vacation messages.
• Introducing the first open standards-based Address Book Server, Snow Leopard Server makes it easier than ever to share contacts across multiple computers.
• Snow Leopard Server uses 64-bit kernel technology to support breakthrough amounts of RAM — up to a theoretical 16TB, or 500 times what is possible today.

All of these sound great…especially for those of use who enjoy Mac mini servers. Packing even more punch in the Mac minis.

(link to article)

“Leopard Server, the newest version of Mac OS X Server, sports many new updated features. One of the most innovative is a new interface that simplifies server setup and management. This new interface is designed primarily for small businesses or small workgroups within a larger organization that need server functionality but don’t have the resources to hire a full-time systems administrator.”

If this sounds like it could be of use to you, head on over for the text and photo walk through on how to get everything set up and running. You can read it here

I setup my first Unix server in 1997 on a Mac Quadra 840AV. It was great way to rehabilitate obsolete macs. My biggest problem then was spam. My war on spam continued for the next several years until I finally got it under control a few years ago. For me, mail filters are not a sufficient answer to spam. It needs to be stopped on request, not after your bandwidth has been wasted. I finally found two very important strategies for stopping spam – greylisting and wildcard addressing.

Greylisting works by passing the expense of communicating with you back to the spammer. It requires them to do something they aren’t willing to do – wait. They aren’t willing to wait because the shotgun approach of mailing they use would be slowed down considerably if they had to comply with the requirements of greylisting. It’s more valuable for them to pass you by and send their crap to someone else.

Under greylisting, when your server receives a mail request it checks the sender and recipient headers. If it does not recognize the pairing it sends back an error code 450 which tells the sending server to try and send again. Traditionally, mail servers are configured to resend email several times over a set period with increasing delays between sends. For example it will try to resend in 15 secs, 30 secs after that and then 1 min, 5 min and so on until either the recipients receives the mail or time runs out. Greylisting refuses to accept the email unless it receives a repeated try /after/ a set delay (like 5 minutes). Spammers can’t afford to resend to all the temporary errors they get.

Greylisting can be added to your mac mini by installing Postgrey. My spam has been cut by more than 90% solely by installing postgrey. Installation postgrey will require you to learn the Unix side of your mini but, believe me the effort is well worth it.

The second strategy uses a little-known feature of postfix but requires you to educate your users in its use. Postfix allows your users to create email addresses for themselves on-the-fly. For example, if I send email to macminicolo and I want to keep an eye on them, I might give them an email address like user+bigcorp@domain.dom. The plus sign here is the wildcard. Postfix allows you to define any wildcard you wish. So email sent back to user+bigcorp will be forwarded to user@domain.dom on your server. Your users can use this if they start getting email at such an address.
If I started getting viagra advertisements or phishing schemes at user+bigcorp I will know that either bigcorp has sold my address or their systems have been comprised to get my address. At that point, I have two actions I can take. I can communicate with the company that compromised my address and I can disable the wildcarded form of that address without disabling the root address.
You can disable the address by adding it to a file referenced by Postfix’s header_check function defined in main.cf. You would add addresses in lines like;

/user\+bigcorp@domain\.com/ REJECT User Unknown

This particular version of disabling does not scale well. My server is fairly small so the number of addresses I’ve had to disable is correspondingly small. Postfix provides better methods for doing the same thing using hash maps. There are many different ways to implement this feature of postfix, If you aren’t familiar with the inner workings of postfix, I highly recommend you check out the postfix website) and find out everything it can do for you.