Category: ViMbAdmin

ViMbAdmin and Vacation / Out of Office Auto-responders

An FAQ post for future reference because, well, it’s a FAQ!

ViMbAdmin is primarily a database frontend for managing virtual mailboxes with mail services such as Postfix and Dovecot.

A frequently asked question is does it / can it support vacation / out of office auto-responders. The short answer is no.

The main way to handle OOO responders is via SIEVE (e.g. Dovecot’s version). To put a front end on this, you need a server configured for external SIEVE management and a client with SIEVE support (which ViMbAdmin does not have).

I’ve done it in three ways in the past:

  1. directly editing the .dovecot.sieve file. This is only really good for people with access to the server and some clue.
  2. Using a Thunderbird plugin allowing editing of SIEVE files. Again, clue required.
  3. For one customer, they can do it via the SoGO web interface we installed for them. This is a very nice interface for people migrating from Exchange.

We did look at fixing a Thunderbird Out of Office plugin but didn’t get very far.

What we all need here is for someone for write / sponsor a decent SIEVE based Thunderbird OOO plugin. Here’s some prior art: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/sieve.

Virtual Mail with Ubuntu, Postfix, Dovecot and ViMbAdmin

As part of pushing our new release of ViMbAdmin, I wrote up a mini how-to for setting up a virtual email system on Ubuntu where the components are:

  • Postfix as the SMTP engine;
  • Dovecot for IMAP. POP3, Sieve and LMTP;
  • ViMbAdmin as the domain / mailbox / alias management system via web interface.

It supports a number of features including mailbox archival and deletion, quota support and display of mailbox sizes (as well as per domain totals).

Find the how-to at:

Synchronising Microsoft Exchange to Another IMAP Server

This post is much less of a detailed how-to but rather some useful links. We were tasked with the job of sync’ing about 1,000 MS Exchange mailboxes to a Dovecot server. This needed to be done via an administrator account on the Exchange end as individual user passwords were not available.

The tool of choice for this is imapsync.  Unfortunately, there is not a single formula that will work for all as it can depend on the Exchange configuration and version as well as the use of domains on the Exchange and ActiveDirectory servers.

To help understand the various combinations of logins for Exchange, I found the following invaluable: Understanding login strings with POP3/IMAP.

Also invaluable is the imapsync FAQ – just search for mentions of Exchange.

In the end, the following worked for me (but your mileage will most definitely vary!):

./imapsync --host1 exchange-server 
    --user1 'domain/adminuser/user' --password1 'admin-password' 
    --authmech1 LOGIN 
    --host2 dovecot-server --user2 user@example.com 
    --password2 userpassword

One key element here is that when logging into Exchange as an individual user I had to use --authmech1 NTLM but if you use this auth method with the above user string, you will always end up logging into the admin’s mailbox, not the user’s. That, at least, was my experience.

Adventures with LDAP (OpenLDAP) – SSL, Multi-Master Replication and Monitoring

In my career to date, I successfully managed to avoid all but the periphery engagement in OpenLDAP. Until recently that is – we had to build a Microsoft Exchange like environment with open source software in a way that was closely integrated and easily managed. But, more on that another time. For anyone else diving into OpenLDAP, here are some articles on my experiences that I have penned:

ViMbAdmin 2.1 Released – POP3/IMAP Access Restrictions

We’ve just pushed a new release of ViMbAdmin – version 2.1. The main highlights are:

  • it’s now possible to restrict access to a mailbox via either IMAP, POP3 or both. See this page on the wiki for more information.
  • it’s our first release requiring a database migration. But it’s really really easy – see this page for those instructions.

As always, a live demo is available at: http://www.opensolutions.ie/vimbadmin/.

“Go Faster” Websites – Introducing Minify

We’ve been minifying and bundling CSS and JS for years to ensure quick page loads of the applications we build. We’ve now generalised, documented and packaged the tool we use for this and released it under a BSD license so others can benefit.

Most web developers know that including lots of JS and CSS files in their sites slow page load times down. Most also know that these files should be minified and bundled into one file on production sites. Most developers don’t do this though. It’s a lot of extra steps in putting your new changes live.

Also, using CDNs or setting expiry times into the future for mostly static files such as CSS and JS also significantly improves page load as clients will grab these files once and use their local cache until their expire. This also poses issues for web developers that is easily overcome by versioning these files – literally adding a version number to the bundles – for example min.bundle-v6.css would be version 6 of the CSS minified and bundled file.

We’ve been doing both of these for a long time with the sites we build. We’ve now generalised, documented and packaged the tool we use for this and released it under a BSD license so others can benefit. See our page on GitHub to download this tool and for examples of its use:

https://github.com/opensolutions/Minify

This tool will:

  • automatically find all CSS/JS files in a given directory named xxx-blah.css where xxx is a three digit ordering / sequence number;
  • minify these files and create a single file bundle including them in the correct order;
  • automatically generate template include files allowing production / development mode (i.e. use individual CSS/JS or bundles based on an application option);
  • versioning for those using CDNs, future expiry dates, etc to ensure clients load fresh JS/CSS bundles.

If you use it, please drop us a note to let us know how you get on! 

ViMbAdmin :: New Release 2.0.6

Today, we’re pleased to announce the immediate availability of 2.0.6 which has a number of incremental fixes and improvements.

Just over a week ago, we released V2 of ViMbAdmin which was a complete UI refresh.

Thanks for all the feedback and bug reports since then.

Today, we’re pleased to announce the immediate availability of 2.0.6 which has a number of incremental fixes and improvements including:

  • Domain is now ‘sticky’ when moving between mailboxes, aliases and logs making it much easier to browse a single domain;
  • A cookie is now used to remember the page length for individual users;
  • We now use grouped icons with tooltips rather than labelled buttons throughout;
  • The horrible your IP address has changed message is gone.

As usual, a full change log is available here and the packaged release can be downloaded directly here.

ViMbAdmin :: Major New Release :: V2

We’ve put some time aside over the last week to do a major UI overhaul on ViMbAdmin – specifically incorporating Twitter’s superb Bootstrap framework. The before an after’s tell a lot about this.

Over a Open Solutions, we’ve put some time aside over the last week to do a major UI overhaul on ViMbAdmin – specifically incorporating Twitter’s superb Bootstrap framework. The before an after’s tell a lot about this. Here’s how it was:

ViMbAdmin - Old Screenshot

And here’s the new improved look:

ViMbAdmin - New

We’ve also closed a lot of bugs, improved the functionality and navigation and added a couple of small features.

Let us know what you think!

 

ViMbAdmin – Migrating to github

I have recently been converted from and SVN user to a Git user. You can read about my road to Damascus moment over in my personal blog.

As such I have converted my co-workers and we have migrated ViMbAdmin to GitHub. We feel that the project is in an early enough stage to not cause too much annoyance with the current user base. We do sincerely apologise for all and any inconvenience caused.

Do you want to continue with your SVN installation?

Feel free to svn switch your base from Google Code to the following which tracks our master (i.e. stable / production / release) branch:

http://svn.github.com/opensolutions/ViMbAdmin.git

Migrating to Git

Just follow the instructions at:

https://github.com/opensolutions/ViMbAdmin/wiki/Install-using-git

and skip the database setup. Just copy over your application/configs/application.ini file to the new Git clone.

Using Official Packaged Releases?

No problem – you’ll now find new versions at:

https://github.com/opensolutions/ViMbAdmin/archives/master

 

ViMbAdmin – We Have a Logo!

As an example of open source in action, we had a note on our Google Code page for ViMbAdmin with a wanted section asking for a logo. Yesterday morning I received a mail from Robert Bell, self professed Head Nerd of Limeworks Australia offering some of his designers time to create one.

24 hours later, we proudly present the new face of ViMbAdmin:

ViMbAdmin Logo

With a cool new logo, we decided we needed to overhaul the login page. You can see the new face of ViMbAdmin at our updated live public demonstration page: http://www.opensolutions.ie/vimbadmin/. This has also been incorporated in a new release version, 0.2.4, which can be downloaded from here.

A sincere thanks to Robert Bell and his team Limeworks Australia for the logo.