Using Gmail to fight SPAM

The Problem


Spam is nothing but unsolicited mails being send to your inbox daily claiming to clear your depts or promising more hair on your scalp or blah blah blah..........


The Remedy

Although a lot of tools are available in the market for finghting this modern age plague of the mailing system like SpamAssassin and MailWasher but my personal favourite is Gmail and following are the reason's for it.


1. Gmail has a powerful spam filter that does a great job filtering out junk( for me it works to the extent of 99..99%)

2 It's FREE


The Trick

Google's free web based Gmail is both an e-mail client and e-mail host .Use gmail e-mail client feature to fetch mail from your another e-mail account so it will have to pass through Gmail's spam filter and hence your life will be much better with less spam.


Lock n Load

Here's a quick insight into the process.

Say i have an e-mail account as bogus@mydomain.com that get's bombard with spam now i will configure my gmail as a pop client for this account fetching mail from it and appling it's powerful spam filter on it hence getting rid of spam to a great extent.


1 . Create a Gmail account ( no problem if you already have one.....lolz)

2 Click on Gmail's settings and open Accounts Tab

3 Select Add another Gmail Account and after verification of your mail account (bogus@mydomain.com in my case) Gmail will start fetching messges from the account ) At this point Gmail Automatically Scan's for spam when it retrieves mail from the alternate account.

4 Now if you do not want the browser-based Gmail as your primary address co configure outlook or thunderbird to receive mail's from your Gmail account.



Now the only change you will notice is that now your mail is less spammy besides this there will be no other visible involvement of google.
Also if accidently some of your important mail have been marked as Spam then they can always be reterieved from the Spam folder.

DNS Round Robin

Round robin DNS is a method of maintaining high-availability and fault tolerance with the help DNS server . RrD can also be thought as poor man's clustering in a very loose sense , though useful it has it's disadvantages also .For more on the topic refer to this wikipedia's page.

SCENARIO

Now please allow me to do some ASCII art

_
10.0.0.1 (web.example.com) | example.com
10.0.0.2 (web.example.com) |-------> DNS <<----->> Client
10.0.0.3 (web.example.com) |

(Wow what a magnificent piece of art )
As is depicted in the above diagram the DNS server has authority for example.com


I implemented Round robin DNS using bind9 and Ubuntu Server 8.10 but it can easily be implemented on any other Linux systems


IMPLEMENTATION

BEFORE

Before multiple duplicate servers for www.example.com we had just a single server for www.example.com and the zone file for example.com looked something like this.

Snippet from the zone file of example.com

www.example.com. IN A 10.0.0.1


AFTER


Now to share the load on the web server of example.com across three servers simply define the define multiple A records with the same name and different IPs in the zone file as in the example below.


www.example.com. IN A 10.0.0.1
www.example.com. IN A 10.0.0.2
www.example.com. IN A 10.0.0.3

The DNS will deliver all the IP addresses defined, the first IP address in the list will be in a default round robin (controlled by the rrset 'named.conf' directive). The WEB servers must all be exact replicas of each other in this scenario.

You can control the order of RR that BIND supplies in response to queries by use of a rrset-order option which works for any set of equal records. The default behaviour is defined to be random-cyclic - a random selection of the initial order thereafter cyclic (round-robin)

Install Fedora10 to a flash drive using windows

Prerequisites for Creating a Live USB Fedora:

• Windows host PC (Tested on Windows XP)

• 1GB+ USB flash drive

• liveusb-creator-3.2.zip

• Fedora10 Live iso image

Steps for creating a live Fedora USB

1) Format your pen drive with FAT file system

2) Download liveusb-creater

3) Extract liveusb-creator-3.2.zip to your PC

4) Navigate to the liveusb-creator-3.2 folder and click liveusb-creator.exe to launch the tool

Although the process of creating a fedora10 usb stick is straingforward from there yet a quick insight into the process goes as follows

a) Use existing live cd ( Browse to the Fedora10 live iso path) or alternatively Download Fedora10
b) Choose the persistant overlay size as per your requirement
c) Select target device to point to your pen-drive
d) Click Create Live USB to begin the creation process




After the completion of the above process restart your PC with your pen drive plugged in ( don't forget to modify your BIOS settings i:e making USB as the first boot device) .If all goes well you will be able to boot your Fedora10 from the pen drive.