Factotum: Documentation Handyman

Lemonade refers to an IETF working group formed to address the requirements of supporting standards-based email in a mobile or other resource-constrained environment. A "resource-constrained" environment is one where any or all of the following might be encountered:

• Low bandwidth, high latency networks
• Intermittent network connectivity
• Scarce power and compute cycles
• Minimizing data usage is a goal

The Lemonade Profile (RFC 5550, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5550) defines a set of IMAP and SMTP extensions that address these constraints. Sun Java System Messaging Server implements the extensions defined in RFC 5550.

For more information on how Messaging Server supports Lemonade, see Messaging Server Lemonade Profile 1 Support.

Hacked Email

The Messaging Server community certainly knows how to deal with this:

• Settin Up a No Phishing Zone
• Protecting Against Spammers Who Compromise Messaging Server User Accounts
  

Last week, I drew attention to a new page of information available on the Communications Suite wiki, recommending that all Messaging Server installations go to the 64-Bit Edition. Today, I updated this page with some more data points that you might want to keep in mind. These points in no way detract from the recommendation, but they do round out the issue. Once more, here's the page: Why Using Messaging Server 64-bit Edition is Better

Yet another Messaging Server expert "caves" to the peer pressure of having a blog. Welcome aboard, Kelly!

Using Messaging Server 64-bit Edition

Beginning with the release of Messaging Server 6.3, on Solaris OS, you have had the choice to install the 64-bit version of Messaging Server. The Communications Suite Product team now recommends that you install 64-bit Edition for new installations on Solaris OS, and upgrade your existing Solaris OS 32-bit Messaging Server deployments to the 64-bit version as time permits. You should no longer be installing the 32-bit version of Messaging Server on Solaris OS.

Reasons to use or switch to Messaging Server 64-bit Edition include:

• Solves the problems with large store.idx files (described in Large store.idx Files Issue).
• Ability to run a reasonable number of imapd processes instead of running dozens of them.
• Better LDAP cache utilization (see also LDAP Cache Tuning in Messaging Server).

  Read the complete writeup.

This Blueprints article could be of use to the Messaging Server population. Synopsis:

This article provides background information on Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam (SBAS) software and CoolThreads technology-powered servers, the configurations used for performance measurements, the challenges presented by benchmarking anti-spam software, and the actual steps used to tune the hardware/software combination to achieve the reported performance levels.

With the continued move towards using Solaris Zones for creating a Messaging Server installation of multiple instances, another approach to this situation might be getting lost in the mix. New in the Communications Suite installer (available with Messaging Server 6.3p1 and 7.0) is an "altroot" power user feature that enables you to install multiple instances of Messaging Server on the same host.

For more information, see the following document:

Performing Multiple Installations with an Alternate Root

A few caveats with this approach:

• This feature gets limited operational testing, so we recommend field testing before deployment in your environment.
• You have to configure the different instances to use different interfaces (for all the components) to prevent conflicts.
• There are a few Messaging Server features that just won't work (for example, SNMP), and others that might require hand-editing to work (for example, SMF startup).
• You need to understand the implications of altroot patching as well (it creates a SVR4 package/patch datastore separate from the main OS datastore for that information).

Hat tip CN

Not sure how in demand this is for the Comms Community, but just in case, Rajesh posted a nice how-to last month, detailing how to hook up the Portal Server Addressbook provider with Communications Express. Here's the link:

http://blogs.sun.com/rajeshthekkadath/entry/address_book_provider_channel_uwc

Some people are addicted. They might even live in a city near you.

Great ideas from the Comms Community on how to deal with phishers.

Ah, the good ol' days. (BTW, gas price was under $1.50/gallon back then, at least in CA.)

Hat tip Doug G.

...it hates the living. (Rumor has it that the slides are on the way.)

Hat tip Jesse

Adding 10,000 servers a month?

We've recently completed an article, posted on the Comms Wiki, titled "Messaging Server and Tiered Storage Overview." Here's a synopsis:

This document describes the operation of Sun Java System Messaging Server message store, its performance characteristics, and how to plan for and allocate store partitions. Additionally, this document describes next generation best practices to meet the storage needs of both ISPs and enterprises.

Part of what this article says is here you are now:

And here is where we think you ought to end up:

This article also contains a very nice summaries of the Comms logical two-tiered architecture as well as how Messaging Server works:

And the survey is in: Spam in a landslide!