Welcome to the rax1 mailserver.

GNU MailmanManage mailing lists.

All other webservices from the previous rax1 are now located on rax29. Please update all your bookmarks.

Documentation

Using the rax1 mailserver

Status

The mailserver on rax1 is in operation and delivers incoming mails. rax1 forwards mail to ramail like rax6 has done. it isn't neccessary to use ramail because of the spam filtering any more. you can remove your .forward file and use rax1 directly.

Overview

This mail server has the following features:

reading mail using IMAP protocol from within university network
reading mail using IMAPS protocol worldwide
sending mail via SMTP from within university network
reading mail using POP3 from within university network
integrated spam filtering
reading and writing mail via the web using squirrelmail or roundcube on rax29

following features are currently work-in-progress:

virus filtering
documentation

Spam filtering

all incoming mail from outside are filtered with spamassassin on the ZDI mailgateway. All mail considered as spam is moved to the 'spam'-subfolder from the rax1 mailserver. This folder can be checked using squirrelmail or an IMAP-enabled mailprogram. Spam mails aren't transferred if you use POP3, they stay on the mailserver by default. please make sure to clean the spam folder from time to time.

To avoid moving spam to the spamfolder you have to create a file

.procmailrc-nospammove

in your home directory on any of our Linux machines. The classification from the ZDI mailgateway won't be affected.

Using Squirrelmail

Point a webbrowser to https://rax29.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/squirrelmail. We are certificated through Deutsche Telekom Root 2 certificate. Browsers with this certificate installed will accept us. Otherwise you will get an unknown certificate error. Login with your username/password for iti network. You'll find some online help within squirrelmail after you logged in successfully.

Using Roundcube

Point a webbrowser to https://rax29.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/rcmail. We are certificated through Deutsche Telekom Root 2 certificate. Browsers with this certificate installed will accept us. Otherwise you will get an unknown certificate error. Login with your username/password for iti network.

Configuring mutt

with the new mailing system, the new mails aren't deliviered to /var/spool/mail anymore. you will have to use imap with mutt:

As a first test start mutt, type 'c' and open this mailbox:

imap://rax1/INBOX

you will be prompted for username/password and then mutt should be connected to the imap-server properly. to delete (or read) spam, open this mailbox:

imap://rax1/INBOX/spam

If this works, alter you .muttrc as follows:

Tell mutt to use your IMAP INBOX as your $spoolfile: set spoolfile=imap://rax1/INBOX
Set your $folder to your IMAP root: set folder=imap://rax1/

Configuring Mozilla Mail

choose: Edit -> Mail and Newsgroups Account Settings... -> Add Account in the wizard choose Email Account, type in you Name and your email address (login@ra...), select IMAP and use rax1 as incoming server. Then check your username, choose a nice account name and finish.

Configuring Outlook

hmm - don't know. click into this program until it works. :-)
you can keep using POP3.
(some windows-crack may add some more hints here...)

Configuring Pine

from main screen go into (S)etup, then (C)onfigure and change the value of 'inbox-path' to '{rax1}INBOX'. Then pine will communicate with rax1 using imap.

Procmail

Procmail filtering is activated system-wide. However, since this is a Cryus/IMAP based mail environment, most .procmailrc scripts will not work and need to be rewritten before they can be used in this environment. The reason behind this is that most .procmailrc scripts work on mbox-style mailboxes which are simply stored in the user's home directory (~/mail/mailboxname) while cyrus stores mail internally in a database.

For your .procmailrc script this means that you'll have to explicitly deliver any mail you want filtered out to a seperate mailbox (other than your inbox) to cyrus. Since most .procmailrc scripts from other/older installations will not work here, they will be ignored. In order to activate them again, you'll have to rename your script to

~/.procmailrc-imapn

To have your mail delivered to a specific mailbox on cyrus, use something like

#

# sample ~/.procmailrc-imapn

#



# header - some variables

PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/bin

DELIVERTO="/usr/lib/cyrus-imapd/deliver -r $SENDER -a $USER"

DEFAULTINBOX="$DELIVERTO -m user/$USER$EXTENSION"



# sample rule

:0 w

| $DEFAULTINBOX

the variables DELIVERTO and DEFAULTINBOX are already defined in the above way.

Vacation

If you are on vacation you can use vacation to return a message to the sender of every mail you receive to tell him that you are on vacation.

To enable vacation you have to login onto rax1 using your account.
Then type

$ vacation

It will give you some instructions like this:

This program will answer your mail automatically when you go away on vacation.

Please do not forget to create the ~/..vacation.msg file.

To enable the vacation program a '~/.forward' file is created.

Would you like to enable the vacation program (y/N)?

Then simply type "y" to enable vacation and generate a file ".vacation.msg" in your home directory that contains you vacation message.

$ nano .vacation.msg

To disable vacation login onto rax1 login onto rax1 using your account and type:

$ vacation

It will then ask you if you want to disable it again:

This program will answer your mail automatically when you go away on vacation.

Please do not forget to create the ~/..vacation.msg file.

You have a '~/.forward' file containing:

    \foobar, "|/usr/bin/vacation foobar"

Would you like to remove it and disable the vacation program (y/N)?

Simply type "y" and vacation is disabled again.

The next time you want to use it just edit your .vacation.msg and call vacation again.

Admin Docs

are located at rax1:/root/doc

Using the SVN Repositories on rax29

The svn repositories are now located on rax29.

Rax29 contains subversion repositories accessible (only) through https protocol. To access the repositories, you need to authenticate yourself using your (LDAP) login and password. Your read/write access rights may vary between repositories and directories within a repository, staff members currently have blanket rw access on all repositories. If you need special per-user r/w permissions on directories, contact me (Stefan Holst). General information about subversion and a user's manual can be found in this online-book.

As subversion does not impose any limitations regarding repository layout, usage policies are defined here. Please follow these guidelines to maintain a clean repository structure. If you accidently violated the structure, I can help to fix it; if you feel the need for a different structure, we can discuss it. Currently there are four repositories for different purposes:

research

Research projects and research-oriented implementation efforts. Top-level directory resembles the project's name and contains three subdirectories (trunk, tags, branches). Your files should be located directly in directory "trunk".

    /repos/research/[project]/trunk
                                   file1
                                   file2
				   ...
                             /tags
			     /branches

If you share a project from eclipse, use "single project layout" to get this structure.

study

student's projects like implementations for diploma thesis and so on. The directory structure is the same as for research projects, but the login-name is used as top-level directory

    /repos/study/[login]/trunk
                             file1
                             file2
			     ...
                        /tags
			/branches

students may get read (or even write) access to research projects they depend on.

admin

Administrative modules like www-pages. The top level directory resembles the administrative task (like "www"). It is up to the individual administrator to decide, if branches and tags directories are necessary.

teaching

lecture and teaching materials like slides, exercise sheets. Top level directory contains the (short) name of the lecture. The subdirectory "current" holds the material for the upcoming or current lecture. After each term, this current-tree is copied to the appropriate year of the form 2006W, 2007S, 2007W,...

   /repos/teaching/[lecture]/current
                                    slides/
				    excercises/
                            /[year]
			    /[year]

To checkout a project: svn co https://rax29/repos/research/project/trunk project