Systems FAQ

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Questions

Accounts

1. How do I get a CS department account?
2. Where do I login?

Email

1. Does the CS department have it's own email server?
2. Does it support IMAP and POP?
3. What can I do about SPAM?

Web Page(s)

1. How do I set up a web page for my account?

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Answers

Accounts

1. How do I get a CS department account?
   Fill out this form and bring it to Li67F. If no one is there, put it under the door.
   
   
2. Where do I login?
   If you have an office, use your department account with your desktop computer. Remotely, use ssh to connect to inbound.cs.albany.edu.
   
   

Email

1. Does the CS department have it's own email server?
   Yes. The CS department's mail server is bathgate.cs.albany.edu (169.226.2.51).
   
   
2. Does it support IMAP and POP?
   We have IMAP4 and IMAPS. We do not do POP.
   
   
3. What can I do about SPAM?
   We have bogofilter available;
   It's easily configured and works very well. Many of the faculty have had success with it. It works in conjunction with procmail.
   You'll need to collect a few hundred spam messages and a few hundred valid email messages in seperate files for training. Then run

       $ /usr/local/bin/bogofilter -s < accumulated_spam_file
       $ /usr/local/bin/bogofilter -n < accumulated_nonspam_file
     

   to create the $HOME/.bogofilter/wordlist.db file giving the statistical picture of words in relation to other words in valid and invalid mail.
   Put a .forward containing

         |exec /usr/local/bin/procmail
     

   in place to run bogofilter on your incoming mail. (make sure there are no group or world write permissions on your .forward file)
   Put the following in your .procmailrc file.

   #=# filter mail through bogofilter, tagging it as spam and
   #=# updating the word lists
   :0fw
   | /var/adm/sm.bin/bogofilter -e -p
   
   # if bogofilter failed, return the mail to the queue, the MTA will
   # retry to deliver it later
   # 75 is the value for EX_TEMPFAIL in /usr/include/sysexits.h
   :0e
   { EXITCODE=75 HOST }
   
   # file the mail to spambox if it's spam.
   :0:
   * ^X-Bogosity: Yes, tests=bogofilter
   $HOME/mail/spam
     

   Periodically check your ~/mail/spam folder from within pine because there is a chance that some messages may be identified wrong.
   You can increase the sensitivity of the spam catcher (at the risk of valid messages potentially marked as spam) by editing the $HOME/.procmailrc line

         | /var/adm/sm.bin/bogofilter -e -p
     

   and adding -o 0.499999 (or some other decimal value, the lower the number, the more likely a message will be identified as spam...this is what I actually use,

         | /var/adm/sm.bin/bogofilter -e -p -o 0.400001
     

   with pretty good results). The correlations can be updated periodically but I just remove the old wordlist.db file and recreate it as above when it starts missing stuff.

Web Page(s)

1. How do I set up a web page for my account?
   

   cd 
   mkdir public_html
   chmod 711 . public_html 
   touch public_html/index.html
   chmod 644 public_html/index.html
                   

   Then customize your ~/.public_html/index.html file.
   

Please send questions or comments about this site to:
erma@albany.edu