Online annoyances

Back after a long hibernation!!

Of late, lots of websites have started asking users to register on their websites even to view content or comment on other's writeups.

Though understandable, too many signups are an annoyance of course. Especially when they start spamming our inboxes. I happened to discover a couple of neat tricks that could help privacy freaks/lazy people like myself.

• A well known trick - BugMeNot: This aggregates account details specific to websites from everybody. When you need to signup, just visit the bugmenot site and query the accounts for the website you want to login. If you don't find any, signup for one at that website and contribute. Paired with the firefox extension, this is a very useful tool.
  
• Another intelligent service - Mailinator: The most painful part of signing up is providing our email address, verifying that and get the followup spam, alerts and so on. Mailinator is a cool service that provide throwaway email addresses for you to use. Once you've provided the email check up in the mailbox just by giving your email address. No need to login, etc.

Neat innovations :-)

Zimbra Crossing

A perfect mail server setup is a holy grail for systems departments in any organisation, whatever maybe it's size.

Whether to host the mail server locally, or outsource the hosting ? Will the data be safe ? Will the service be secure ? Will my provider be stable and is 1Mbps enough for my mails and internet access ? What solution do we adopt ? What will be the ROI/TCO/TLA ?

These and a zillion other questions arise in the minds of the systems, finance and other top management guys. In our company, we've been advising, deploying and maintaining a number of email servers for small organisations to large organisations with users ranging from only a couple to hundreds. Initially, we deployed custom home grown solutions using Postfix, Courier, Squirrelmail, OpenLDAP, MySQL, Spamassassin, ClamAV, Amavis along with a user management module, we wrote in PHP.

The installations were (are, in some cases) very robust, stable, scaling and had been extended extensively beyond the initial requirements (For eg, integrating with PureFTPd). Though we and our clients were very happy with these, we always felt the need for more features - to manage mail queues, better analysis and statistics amongst others.

In the meantime, there was a product which was making news as a featureful but open source email system - Zimbra. I took a look at the Zimbra, and was elated by the fact that Zimbra used the same open source components that we used to build our own system. Then, I was taken aback when I discovered most of the frontend was written in Java. Also, their complete IMAP/POP/Mailbox implementations are in Java - specific to Zimbra. Actually, I don't have anything against Java. In a couple of projects, I used to even enjoy the breaks I got while java code got compiled :-P. But nevertheless Zimbra wasn't for me. Yet!!

After a couple of months, when a customer asked for some very particular features. We discovered that it would take us aeons to implement that same features and integrate, given our limited resources. We finally bit the bullet and worked on deploying Zimbra for the client. Basing it on Debian GNU/Linux Sarge, we had a wonderful learning experience with Zimbra. We wrote several tools and utilities using which we migrated the users seamlessly and efficiently. Zimbra took off.

But, later we came across several bloopers with Zimbra - the distribution list didn't work, (btw, Zimbra's console management client works well), the number of new mails were misleading. Since the code was in java, we couldn't take the code, repair the same in a shorttime.

Recently, we upgraded Zimbra from 3.1.2 to a fairly large project Zimbra-4.5. It was such a wonderful experience - stage-by-stage application upgrade, it is very rarely used elsewhere.

... To be continued!!