Overview and Basic Operations of the UPLB Mailing System I. Overview II. Basic Operations 1.

Adding new email accounts 2. Deleting email accounts 3. Resetting account passwords 4. Adding new mailing list 5. Deleting mailing list 6. Resetting mailing list owner passwor III. Common problems and troubleshooting I. Overview The UPLB email system is composed of different softwares each with its own specific function. Below is a brief description of the packages used in our mail server. (Note: All packages below are free/open-source softwares installed on Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 Etch.) Postfix SMTP server responsible for sending and receiving e-mails. Cyrus IMAP and POP3 server responsible for storing emails and managing mailbox. SASLDB2 This is the database where all username and password are stored. Used by Postfix and Cyrus for authenticating users. AMaViS (A Mail Virus Scanner) - scans e-mail attachments for viruses using third-party virus scanners available for Unix/ environments. Rzor One of the third party application used by Amavis for scanning viruses. From Rzor Website: Vipul's Razor is a distributed, collaborative, spam detection and filtering network. Through user contribution, Razor establishes a distributed and constantly updating catalogue of spam in propagation that is consulted by email clients to filter out known spam. Detection is done with statistical and randomized signatures that efficiently spot mutating spam content. User input is validated through reputation assignments based on consensus on report and revoke assertions which in turn is used for computing confidence values associated with individual signatures. Pyzor - Works the same as Rzor, installed for additional spam-detecting ability. SpamAssassin another third party application used by Amavis. It is basically a mail filter which attempts to identify spam using a variety of mechanisms including text analysis, Bayesian filtering, DNS blocklists, and collaborative filtering databases. Below is a diagram to present an overview of how our email system works. When receiving an email: 1. The SMTP server first checks if the recipient account is existing and other conditions. 2. If not all conditions are satisfied then it sends a error reply to the sender SMTP server, else 3. The SMTP server passes the email to an internal virus/spam checker(Amavisd). 4. If the email is tagged as a spam then it is stored in a virus database and the mail administrator is notified, else it is passed back to the original SMTP server. 5. The SMTP server then passes the email to the Cyrus server where it is stored under the user mailbox where the user can download it later for viewing.

When sending an email: 1. The SMTP server first request for user authentication before sending an email. (This step is not visible for webmail users.) 2. The mail is then check according to its domain name. If the mail is for @uplb.edu.ph then it then follows the step of When receiving an email.

3. If the mail is not intended for a local mail user, it is then relayed to another mail server. II. Basic Operations 1. Adding new email accounts: 1. To add a new user to our existing email system create a text file (for this example we use new.txt) 2. Edit new.txt and enter the following, LastName, FirstName MiddleInitial. Then save and exit. 3. Test first if the user account is already existing: /usr/local/bin/addmailusers_test.pl new.txt 4. If it returns an error then use then the username is already taken. To resolve this edit the file again and append numbers like 2,3,4...etc then try running the script again until the script does not return an error message. 5. Run: /usr/local/bin/addmailusers.pl new.txt" 2. Deleting email accounts: 1. Create a file and place username@uplb.edu.ph then save. 2. Run: /usr/local/bin/delmailusers.pl filename 3. Resetting account passwords 1. Create a file and place account username then save. 2. Run: /usr/local/bin/resetmailusersdirect.pl filename 4. Adding new mailing list 1. Run: /usr/sbin/newlist newlistname 1. Follow the instructions and copy the lines to /etc/aliases 2. Run: newaliases 3. Deleting mailing list 1. Run: /usr/sbin/rmlist listname 1. Follow the instructions in deleting the lines in /etc/aliases 2. Run: newaliases 3. Resetting mailing list owner passwords: 1. Run: /var/lib/mailman/bin/change_pw l listname III. Common problems and troubleshooting 1. Dedicated hard drive for mail is full. Due to our increasing number of users and number of sent messages per day, the size of storage use is slowly filling up our dedicated hard drive. (As of this writing we are already using 160GB hard drive). If this problem the easiest solution is to increase the hard drive space possibly by purchasing a higher capacity hard drive, then copying all the contents of the existing dedicated hard drive to the new hard drive. 2. Other problems. There are many problems that can come up when managing a mail system. It is the job of the mail administrator to isolate the cause and solve it. Reading the log files under /var/log/ directory is a good start for debugging any problems. Reproducing or redoing the steps that lead to the problem should be also done.