41 How File Sharing Promotes Collaboration. Workgroup Manager or Server Admin. Configure and administer a JBoss application server on Mac OS X. If you change the identity of the top weblog folder in Server Admin, existing folders. A standard mail client uses Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to send. Email clients come in all shapes and sizes, but when it comes to the options available on the Mac, we feel that Airmail is the best email client for most people.
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␡- Basic Mail Server Configuration with Server Admin
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Basic Mail Server Configuration with Server Admin
Although mail services under Mac OS X Server are a collection of Unix tools traditionally managed from the command line, Apple has made the initial setup and basic management functions conveniently accessible as part of Server Admin and Workgroup Manager. The Server Admin Mail pane makes configuring the majority of email functions very simple and creates a one-stop place to configure Postfix, Cyrus, and Mailman (the Unix service that manages mailing lists under Mac OS X Server). For new administrators, using Server Admin to set up and manage mail services can ease not only the process but also the learning curve. Even for experienced administrators, it can provide a more efficient tool for viewing and changing basic configuration options.
To get started, launch Server Admin and authenticate to the appropriate server (provided that you run Server Admin remotely instead of on the server itself). Select Mail in the Computers And Services list. As with most Server Admin panes, the Mail pane contains five panes, including Overview, Logs, Connections, Maintenance, and Settings.
Overview, which is initially displayed, gives you a snapshot of your mail server (including whether or not mail services are running, which mail transfer agents are running (outgoing SMTP, incoming SMTP, POP, and IMAP), how many users are currently connected to the server using IMAP, and the status and number of mailing lists being hosted by the server.
Logs provide an easy way to view the various mail server logs. You can view the logs for each of the component mail transfer agents as well as a series of logs for specific mailing list–related events and logs for virus scanning and junk mail filtering. The Connections pane displays the current IMAP and POP connections to the server. Maintenance, which we’ll discuss more in part 3 of this series, enables you to view the status of current email accounts, message queues, mail store databases, and to configure email migration from mail services under Mac OS X Server 10.2 and earlier.
The Settings pane, as you might guess, is the place in which you manage most of the mail server configuration. It contains seven tabs: General, Relay, Filters, Quotas, Mailing Lists, Logging, and Advanced. The first of these, General, contains the major functions needed to set up mail services.
As shown in Figure 1, the General tab contains a number of checkboxes that manage the mail services configuration. The first two checkboxes are to enable POP and IMAP access. When IMAP is enabled, you can specify a maximum number of connections. You might take advantage by limiting the number of connections to only the number of email accounts that you actually create or the number of computers in your organization. There is also an option to deliver all incoming email to the /var/mail folder in the event that POP and IMAP are both disabled.
Figure 1 Mail service general settings
The next option is to enable and configure SMTP. You have the option of enabling SMTP as a whole and the option of allowing or disallowing incoming mail. The capability to disallow incoming mail can be useful if you find your server is the target of a large amount of spam or a mail-based network attack. By disallowing incoming mail, your users will still be able to exchange internal email and send email outside of your organization while you work to deal with the problem.
Next are the fields in which you can enter both the Internet domain name and the host name of the mail server. These should match the domain and mail exchanger configured for your DNS records. If you are using an internal DNS configuration that is strictly internal to your network as well as external DNS managed by your ISP, use the domain name and hostname registered with your ISP because this is how other mail servers will communicate with your mail server.
The next option, Hold Outgoing Mail, enables the server to accept messages from email clients but not attempt to send them. This can be a useful feature if your Internet connection goes down because it enables your users to write and send email without error messages during the outage. After the problem is resolved, you can unselect this checkbox, and the server will attempt to deliver and hold mail.
Relay Outgoing Mail Through Host is the next option. This option enables you to route outgoing emails through another mail server instead of attempting to send email directly. In larger organizations with multiple email servers, this option can be used to have a single server that connects to the Internet, which is often placed on a demilitarized zone (DMZ) port on a firewall to provide increased security. It is also used in small organizations to allow your ISP to manage the actual transfer of email beyond your network. If selected, the appropriate server address in the associated field.
The last two options enable you to designate that copies of emails be sent to a separate email address from the recipient of the message. The first checkbox specifies this for mail that is undeliverable. This is good if someone leaves your organization but outside contacts (vendors, customers, and so on) still send email to that address because it provides an option for responding to them with a correct email address or forwarding the message to the appropriate person. It can also act as a catchall for emails incorrectly addressed to your organization.
The final option copies all emails to a specified address. This option can be controversial because it means that any email your users send is recorded without their knowledge. Although there are any number of reasons why a business or school might choose to use this option (to monitor the use of the organization’s email server or as a result of suspicion of confidential information being released for two examples), there is a privacy issue. If you opt to use this option (or are asked to use it), it is best to include a computer use policy that says all emails may be monitored. Also, consider that this could potentially affect the storage of your mail server as large numbers of emails are copied to the specified address. In fact, the sheer number of messages could make it difficult to sort through for signs of inappropriate activity.
The next tab on the Settings pane is Relay (shown in Figure 2). It contains three listboxes, each of which has a checkbox to enable or disable its contents. The first and most important is Accept SMTP Relays Only From These Hosts And Networks. SMTP relay (sometimes referred to as outgoing SMTP) is the method by which SMTP clients transfer emails to a server, which then connects to other SMTP servers to deliver those messages. Relaying is therefore important, but if you simply allow relaying from any computer (known as open relay), any email client on the Internet could send mail through your server. Most spam operators work by finding open relays on the Internet and send spam by using them. This can lead to overloading and blacklisting of your server.
This option enables you to specify that only relays from computers with certain IP addresses will be accepted by your server. You can either enter individual IP addresses or use cider notation to specify networks or subnets. Users from other network locations will either not be able to send email through your server or will need to authenticate in order to send email. (We’ll cover how to configure such authentication in part 3 of this series.) By default, this option is selected and includes the loopback address for the server (which should always be included) and any IP address within the same network as the server’s IP address. You should specify subnets more granularly than this. To add, remove, or edit the entries in the listbox, use the plus, minus, and pen icon buttons next to it.
The second listbox, Refuse All Messages From These Hosts And Networks, is used to specify the IP addresses of individual mail servers or whole networks known to perpetrate mail-based network attacks or spam. Again, you should specify networks using cider notation. Because you might not know in advance the addresses of server generating spam or network attacks, you will typically have to wait until such events present themselves to input the appropriate address into this listbox.
The third listbox, Use These Junk Mail Rejection Servers (Real-Time Blacklist), offers you the ability to subscribe to one or more blacklist servers. Blacklist servers contain records of networks that are either known to be used for sending spam, are open relays, or are identified as being at risk of use for spam or network attacks by some set of criteria (which can vary depending on the servers being used). Blacklists can be helpful for providing a preemptive approach to avoiding spam or attacks. However, there are times when servers will be inadvertently added to a blacklist when they are not being used maliciously or are not open relays. In these cases, using a blacklist can prevent legitimate emails from not being delivered to your network. Also, it can be difficult to get a server removed from a blacklist after it has been added. This is a good reason to ensure that your server is not an open relay and that it is not used for malicious purposes by your users. To use a blacklist server, enter the appropriate address of the server in this box.
The Filters tab enables you to configure automatic scan options for junk mail and viruses. There are also additional tools that can be added to your server from the command line. (Filters will be discussed in the third article of this series.)
The Quotas tab (shown in Figure 3) enables you to configure the way the server responds to mailbox quotas for your users (quotas themselves are configured for users when creating their accounts in Workgroup Manager). It also enables you to designate a maximum size for incoming messages. This can be very helpful because extremely large messages can reduce overall performance of your Internet connection as well as affect the transfer of other email. To set a maximum message size, check the Refuse Incoming Messages Larger Than X Megabytes and enter a size in the appropriate field.
Figure 3 Mail service quota settings
The other two options deal with what happens when users reach quotas and when warning messages should be sent. The first option is a checkbox to disable incoming mail for use when they reach their quota (along with an associated message that will be delivered to their mailbox). The second option is to enable warnings before the quota is reached. With this option selected, you can enter the text of the warning message as well as at what percentage of the quota the warning should be received (the default is 90%). You can also designate how often (in days) a warning message should be delivered (the default is one per day).
How you use quota is up to you. Needless to say, for the sake of storage space and other resources, you should encourage users not to let their mailboxes get out of hand. However, many people today rely on saved email; if you are using IMAP, those saved emails need to reside on the server. If you opt to turn off email access after a quota is reached, you should most definitely use warnings. I would set them to be sent at around 75% of the quota so that users have some time to either clean out their mailboxes or request an increase in their quota some time before email access is disabled.
The Mailing Lists tab (shown in Figure 4) enables you to create mailing lists. Like the other mail services in Mac OS X Server, mailing lists are handled by a Unix tool called Mailman. However, the mailing list functions are significantly less integrated with Open Directory compared with the other mail components. Although the Mailing List tab includes a button to display the users and groups available to the server through Open Directory, it is merely a reference for easily including mail-enabled user accounts. As a result, when you create mailing lists you must specify mailing list permissions explicitly for the Mailman when adding users to the list. You must also specify an administration password for all mailing list management. Also, unlike mail services in Mac OS X 10.2 and earlier, AppleShare IP, or Microsoft Exchange, you cannot directly specify groups as being used for email distribution.
The first step in working with mailing lists is to enable Mailman. The simplest way to do this is by checking the Enable Mailing Lists checkbox on the Mailing Lists tab. The first time you enable mailing lists, you will be asked to specify a mailing list master password and one or more email addresses for users who will act as mailing list administrators. These users will be made members of a Mailman mailing list and will receive an email containing the administration password.
You can create additional mailing lists by clicking the plus sign below the Lists listbox (you can also use the minus sign button and the pencil button to delete or modify a selected list). When you create a new list or edit an existing list, you see a dialog sheet that includes fields for the listname and admin user. The name of the list will be used as the first half of the list’s email address (the second half after the @ symbol will be whatever domain name is assigned to the server). The dialog sheet also includes an option to allow users to self-subscribe to the list (if you don’t select this option, you will need to manage the list membership manually); a pop-up menu to select the default language for the list, and a series of checkboxes to identify which languages or character sets will be supported for emails sent to the list; and you can also choose to enter a maximum size for messages in kilobytes.
You can subscribe users to a list in two methods of user Server Admin. The first is to press the Users & Groups button to display a drawer containing the available user accounts from Open Directory. You can then drag one or more users into the Members listbox while the appropriate mailing list is selected in the Lists listbox. The downside to this approach is that each user will automatically receive the same mailing list permissions (subscribe and post). If you want to alter them, you will need to deselect the appropriate checkboxes next to each address. Remember that when you do this, all that is really happening is the email address specified in the user’s account is being copied to Mailman.
The second method is to click the add (plus sign) button underneath the Members listbox while the appropriate list is selected. This brings up a dialog sheet in which you can enter a complete email address or user account identifiers (which basically means user shortname from Open Directory), or you can drag users from the Users and Groups drawer if it is displayed. You can also select which mailing list permissions to apply to all the users you specify.
The Logging tab enables you to configure which mail-related events are recorded into the various mail server logs and to set archiving options for the logs—pretty much as you would do with any other services using Server Admin. You can set the logging details independently for SMTP, IMAP/POP, and Junk Mail/Virus scanning. The available options for each include Critical, Error, Warning, Notice, Information, and Debug (Critical is the least informative—only logs serious—whereas Debug includes information about any server event). The exact events logged at each level vary slightly for each of the three options, and selecting each level will show the details of what is logged.
The Advanced tab, which will be discussed in greater detail in part 3 of this series, contains three tabs: Security, Hosting, and Database. The Security tab enables you to define which encryption techniques are allowed to be used by email clients when transmitting usernames and passwords when sending or receiving email. This is also where you can determine whether or not the server will use SSL to ensure that emails are securely transmitted between the server and email clients and the security certificates used for SSL. The Hosting tab enables you to configure virtual hosting and local host aliases for the server. The Database tab enables you to change the location(s) where mail is stored as well as the location of the mail server database.
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Mac users have many choices of using different email clients. Apple Mail and Microsoft Outlook are the two widely used email clients on Mac systems. However, with the availability of different email clients, users do not have to depend completely on these two. Depending upon the need, a user can choose any email client.
These email clients are supported by all versions of Mac OS X. Current statistics revels that version wise market share of OSX are as follows :
- Mac OS X 10.9 3.66%
- Mac OS X 10.10 1.18%
- Mac OS X 10.6 0.72%
- Mac OS X 10.8 0.57%
- Mac OS X 10.7 0.56%
- Mac OS X 10.1 0.19%
- Mac OS X 10.5 0.14%
- Mac OS X 10.4 0.03%
Note: Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks and Yosemite are popular naming convention for Mac OS X.
There are many email clients, which provide advanced features to cater the need of various users. With the availability of so many email clients, Apple Mail and Microsoft Outlook no longer remain stagnant email clients. Moreover, it is even harder to choose the best email client from so many different clients.
Some of the Mac Mail Clients available for Mac OS X are mentioned below.
PostBox 3
Postbox 3 is a smart and reliable email client for Mac OS X. Though it is not new, but, it has maintained a traditional look and feel of Mac. It provides a set of advanced features and makes you feel as if you are working with Apple Mail. Some of the
- Provides a safe and smooth way of handling email.
- Smooth way of setting of POP and IMAP accounts with the ability of analyzing and finding the right IMAP configuration.
- Easy loading of huge number of messages with a progress bar to track the progress
- Enhance the emailing experience by a set of new features and very interactive and easy to use interface.
- Easy handling of messages with marking facility at the beginning and end. You can quickly reply to the latest messages and easily follow any message thread. In addition, you can easily see the sender of the message with the help of the inspector pane next to each message and click them to see the sender’s contact details.
- Advanced searching mechanism based on the sender of the message. This option allows you to search for any messages, images, or attachments just by clicking the links within their address book info.
- Inbuilt ability to write a new mail in an easy way by choosing your response preferences from a pull down menu.
- Works easily with many tools like Evernote to keep track of the services you send to them.
- Can easily be used with the Dropbox. By simply dragging and dropping the files, allow the receiver of the message to download the file directly from the Dropbox account.
- Uses the Gravatar service to get images and acquaintances.
- Perform various operations on task like creating new tasks, checking finished off tasks, etc. by using the To-Do mode.
- Maintains your favorite feeds by integrating the RSS reader into it.
- Allows support for Gmail by allowing the use of Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts. Such a feature can be used at anytime, whenever required.
- Advanced Online help files to help you find and use all these features.
With all these features Postbox 3 is considered to be one of the best options for the majority of the Mac Mail clients’ user.
Inky
Inky is yet another Mac mail client, which has lots to offer. It combines the features of a highly professional email client meant for business as well as provides various other features required by many other users. Some of the key features of Inky are mentioned below.
- Provides great portability by storing the mails on a remote server and information about the POP and IMAP accounts on itself.
- Require only one account login credentials to get all the emails to any computer.
- Provides a very interactive and transparent interface, which allows you the view mail on the basis of individual accounts or clever Smart Views.
- Uses an advanced algorithm to categorize maps, package info, daily deals, subscription mailings, etc. automatically.
- You can set Inky to arrange your email on the basis of relevance by just clicking on the icons.
- It is free to use and incorporates new ideas that can be well executed to provide the best a user is looking for.
Mail Pilot
Mail Pilot also provides more or less the same features as offered by other email clients. Some of the noted features of Mail Pilot are mentioned below.
- Mail Pilot considers each message as a task. With this, you can perform any action to a message instantly or at a later time. In addition, you can set reminders for a later action. Moreover, such tasks can be performed by making use of the various keyboard shortcuts present at the bottom of the screen.
- It uses the IMAP protocol to set up an account.
- Provides various options to navigate message thread, sort them, and stack them.
- Many of the features like the ability to save a new message as a draft, is still under construction. However, the Mail Pilot client is worth a use.
Unibox
Unibox is a well structured and designed email client for Mac OS X. You can take advantage of the following features if you are using Unibox as an email client.
- Takes a quick and easy approach to set up IMAP accounts.
- Displays the mailbox on the basis of the sender on a particular day.
- Easy switching between multiple sender’s message thread from the top of the screen.
- With the interface involving just one window, you can utilize maximum space.
- Various buttons to sort, junk, or delete a message as well as replying and forwarding options appears on the left and right side of the screen.
AirMail
It is another very economical Mac mail client to be used on Mac OS X. Some of its features are mentioned below.
- Interactive and nice interface
- Inexpensive client to be used with IMAP-based webmail.
However, unlike the Post box 3 as discussed before, the Dropbox option is not easy to set up.
Apple Mail
The Apple mail is the default Mac mail client for Mac OS X. With Mavericks, the latest OS X, the mail comes free of cost. Some of the features of this email client are mentioned below.
- Advanced search features based on the attachments and attachment types.
- Support for Microsoft Exchange accounts.
Sparrow 1.3.1
As the name says, Sparrow 1.3.1 is a very light and elegant email client for Mac OS X. With this you can configure your Gmail and Yahoo addresses and get them loaded into it within minutes. Some of the other features include the following.
- Maintains the same color coding and labels as used in Gmail or Yahoo folders.
- Allows you to create new labels in Sparrow in a color-coded fashion.
- Allows you to link the messages to any message sorting rule.
- Very interactive and beautiful interface.
Thunderbird 3
Though Apple Mail is considered to be the best email client for Mac OS X, however, with the latest Thunderbird 3, many feel that it is better than the Apple Mail. Some of the latest features incorporated in Thunderbird are mentioned below.
- Tabs for email are one of the latest features introduced in Thunderbird 3.
- Allows you to open more than one Web page in tabs.
- Allows you to open emails and search results in new tabs.
- Supports various add-ons to enhance the working experience with it.
Outlook for Mac 2011
Outlook for Mac 2011 is the same tool as we have MS Outlook for Windows. Until Outlook for Mac 2011, Entourage 2008 was used as an email client for MAC OS X. With the latest Outlook for Mac 20011, it has incorporated some features of the Entourage 2008 as well has added many of its new features. Some of the features of Outlook for Mac 2011 are mentioned below.
- You can keep intact your emails from PC and tasks together in a Mac inbox
- It allows you to unify your messages, contacts, calendars, etc. of your home and office
- Uses a single subject to condense long email threads
- You can view the schedule display while viewing the meeting invitation
- Easily migrate from Windows by just making use of the PST file and using the import tool
- Uses a single folder to consolidate all your work and home emails
- Keep all things integrated without any fear of losing any work
- Supported across various operating systems like Mac OS X or Windows 7
- Lightweight workflow
- Allows attachment preview and data backup using the Time Machine feature
With the availability of so many email clients for Mac OS X, there is always a need for a Mac mail converter. A person using Thunderbird often looks to migrate to Outlook for Mac 2011. Both Thunderbird and Outlook for Mac 2011 uses different file formats and are not compatible with each other. It is always recommended to have Stellar Mac mail converter to convert mails from one email client’s file format to another.