Back to Newsletters KEYWORDS= Davrom Consulting Newsletter - Issue # 42 - Dated: 24 Aug 2008 From the desk of David Clark In this issue I have touched on connecting to your Linux/UNIX e-mail server with your mobile phone. Something I have taken for granted for several years now but realise that some people didn't know they could do it. I have also covered some quick strategies for handling old e-mail mailboxes - something I have had to deal with a lot lately for various customers. This article is a follow on from handling root user e-mail which I covered in newsletter issue 34. Support continues to be working on all things Linux/SCO/SnapGear and getting into MySQL/PHP projects. I would like to thank the reader for their time in reading this newsletter. David.M.Clark UNIX Quote ...Unix, MS-DOS, and Windows (also known as the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly). --- Matt Welsh Mobile phone e-mails with Linux servers I have been using e-mail through my mobile phone for some years now interfacing with our Linux e-mail server and realised that there are still quite a few people out there who don't realise this is possible. You don't need any special software and most mobile phone based e-mail facilities fully support POP and IMAP. The best results are to use IMAP so the downloads from your server are kept to a minimum (mobile phone carrier pricing still stings a bit price-wise if you go downloading too many megabytes). To access your e-mail you will need to enter your Linux IP/hostname, username and password for your e-mail account on the server into the phone's IMAP settings. IMAP also ensures that whatever actions you take in handling the e-mail from your phone, they are reflected when you get back to the office and use your e-mail on your PC or laptop. You set your phone to still use your mobile phone carriers default SMTP server for outbound e-mail. On some phones you have the ability to use a VPN connection and all your e-mail traffic can use this method for accessing your internal e-mail server. My mobile can VPN into our network through our SnapGear firewall/gateway. The alternative is to do what we do here and simply talk to the IMAP port on our firewall/gateway which handles the port forward to our e-mail server. The outbound SMTP e-mail goes through our mobile phone providers SMTP server. The mobile I currently use is a Samsung BlackJack which I chose as I need a qwerty keyboard (going back to Nokia as soon as I can get a good qwerty keyboard or stylus keyboard model - and yes this is also because I don't really like Windows on a mobile). I really do recommend finding a qwerty capable mobile if you intend to send e-mail this way. I did use the good old SMS style e-mail through the number keypad but this takes a long time to compose long e-mails - or this might just be my slow keypad skills. In any event, I would encourage you to explore using your mobile in this way as it allows you to keep in touch with the world whilst you are out and about. Old mailboxes never purge If you are dealing with a Linux or UNIX server that has been installed for a few years, particularly if the server is actively used for e-mail, it doesn't take long for you to gather an ever growing collection of old mailboxes that belong to staff who have moved on from your organisation. It is interesting to see mailboxes still receiving e-mails from subscriptions, spammers and from people who have put the person on an e-mail list that has just continually fed e-mail into the mailbox. (Hopefully this newsletter is not one of them) So if you have someone who has left your organisation firstly review what is in their mailbox. If there is important e-mail that you don't want to lose then forward it to another user or transfer the mailbox to another active mailbox. Next decide if the e-mail account is to reamain as an active recipient for your organisation and have the incoming e-mails forwarded (using aliasing or virtual user tabling) to someone in the organisation who can process them. Finally you need to delete the user from the system so e-mails sent to this user bounce or at least ensure they don't go into the mailbox folder filling up your hard disk. From the Trenches Some comic or not so comic relief from the support days gone by. Working for a national corporation many years ago, I attended and annual national conference where we all got together and went through the usual motivational and team building exercises. As I was responsible for the new Internet connection and all things e-mail I often sent out detailed procedures via e-mail on options staff could use to communicate with the outside world. This was in the days when a 2400 baud modem connection to the Internet was state of the art and ftpmail was the way to download files. At the conference I met a group of people from one of the other state branches and upon introducing myself they all in unison said, "Ah, so you're David Clark, delete, are you sure, yes." This was the option for the e-mail reader at the time to delete and confirm deleting the e-mail. We all broke out in laughter but it was nice to know my long procedural e-mails were receiving some recognition, all be it bad. Tech Tip Simple math at the command line: If ever you need to do some maths at the UNIX/Linux command line I would recommend using bc. bc allows you to do all kinds of tricks with maths and here are some simple ones below. You can just run the bc command then type in math but below I have shown how to do some maths and also placing one of the reslults into a system shell variable: Simple Addition: echo "20 + 40" | bc -l and to set as a variable: MINUTES=`echo "20 + 40" | bc -l` the value for $MINUTES is now 60. Subtraction: echo "60 - 20" | bc -l Multiplication: echo "5 * 5" | bc -l Division: echo "75 / 5" | bc -l And finally playing with two decimal places when dealing with money values: echo "scale=2; 90.00 + 9.95" | bc -l Back to Newsletters 
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