When you have an important message to convey (or perhaps a not so important one), it’s all too easy to fire up your text editor and send out email with fancy fonts and lots of bright colours. Why not attach an illustrative image or PowerPoint presentation for good measure? It just makes the email as [...]

One of the ideas we had implemented for a while on our edge mail infrastructure was the concept of Greylisting.
The goal of greylisting is to reduce the amount of spam that reaches user mailboxes by taking advantage of the fact that spammers do not operate fully standards-compliant mail servers. [...]

qmail has a lot of quirks due to its design of small compartmentalized daemons. One of the issues which impacts us a lot is its delayed-bounce behavior. An out of the box qmail installation only rejects mail for recipient domains not in ‘rcpthosts’ and from senders listed in ‘badmailfrom’.
That means if someone sends a [...]

When we first started out, our focus was to combine two existing mailing lists which were run using majordomo and Listproc. Whilst both were fine mailing list servers, they were a but unwiedly to setup and Listproc at that time required a paid license which made it expensive.
Around the same time (circa 1996-97), qmail was [...]

Tried to migrate jamaats.mumineen.org but didn’t factor in various issues related to salaat databases. We have rolled it back. It’s time for a change of scenery and we’ll move on to migrate our incoming mail server

Some of our readers have asked us what are the qualifications required to work with mumineen.org . Do you have to be Ph.D in Computer Science to understand the server infrastructure or be a full-time professional in Web design to do layout and content.
The answer is neither. mumineen.org volunteers come from varied backgrounds. [...]

Many developers assume that the performance of a website depends on the server’s CPU performance and the connectivity of the server to its ISP.
Whilst this is true, another important factor on server performance is how the connectivity characteristic of the sites end-users impacts it
Keep in mind that a dynamic website consists of 2 components, creation [...]

A website developer should always strive to provide a better user experience, with a combination of a design and layout where the information the end user seeks is easily available and a performant site so the user is not experiencing the World Wide Wait.
An engineer deals in terms of tradeoffs. With Moore’s Law showing no [...]

Astute readers will remember this post where we alluded to the setup of a web-server for dynamic content.
We’ve also mentioned our use of Linux,Apache and PHP. In the Free/Libre/Open Source Software world, the use of these software solutions typically alongwith a database such as MySQL is known as using a LAMP software stack.
The ability of [...]

A few of our intrepid HTML commandos tried connecting to the shiny new all singing dancing PureFTPD server. Some got through okay (hey, the server ninjas verified there username/password before giving them the go ahead) but some were stumped when they couldn’t connect
Here’s a few things HTML commandos and users of the ftp server should [...]