Email & Spam strategies
1 February 2011
Email is now a key part of any business. Streamlining the process of sending & receiving email reduces the workload for the entire office. In particular, implementation of a well-considered Spam-fighting strategy can save hours per person per week
Email is no longer a simple proposition. Using it efficiently requires managing Spam, archiving & storing (and backing up) email, giving secure access to mobile users (iPhone, MacBook, etc), setting up mailing lists and, in some setups, providing webmail
The diagram above shows a typical OS X Mail Server setup. OS X Server uses Open Source components, such as the hugely popular SMTP server Postfix, and integrates them under a familiar OS X interface. It’s not a perfect creation but it does offer a number of advantages over other approaches. By integrating SpamAssassin and ClamAv into the setup it’s possible to reject Spam and viruses before they reach the server. Spam and viruses are rejected based on their “scores” against a blacklist. As new virus signatures and spam mails are recognised and added to the blacklists the server is updated automatically. Using this setup we’ve seen delivered Spam drop almost to zero and the email management workload decrease 90% – a huge return on investment
The use of iPhones and computers at home presents a real challenge for email users. The traditional method of transferring mail from the server to the user (POP mail) works very poorly when multiple machines are used. Mail sent from one location doesn’t appear in the Sent box at the other. Similarly, mails deleted on one machine appear again on the other. It’s a poor system and it makes migrating users from one machine to another very time-consuming. IMAP mail solves all these problems at the cost of requiring a powerful server with decent amounts of storage. IMAP keeps mail on the server and users see a copy on their machines. Delete an email on one and it’s deleted on the server and on the other machines. Migrating users is simple – setup the account on another machine and the email account – complete with its mailboxes – is downloaded automatically from the server
Some companies like to use webmail in a browser. OS X Server supports this using the built-in SquirrelMail server. Similarly, Mailing Lists are (relatively) easily setup in Mailman and can be used for internal group emails or for larger marketing campaigns
OS X Server supports multiple domain names so you can host more than one company domain on your server. It allows transparent mail forwarding between addresses and domains, so you can forward a generic name such as accounts@yourcompany.co.uk to a specific person, and automatic delivery to multiple mailboxes. SSL encrypted email and multiple types of authentication are possible – handy if you have Windows-based users
The Mail server builds on the existing file server database of users. So adding a mail account for a new user just requires a checkbox to be ticked
[...] to email (1) is generally straightforward. If you have your own mail server it’s simple to allow access to it from outside the building. If you are using the mail [...]