On the reseller server I had access to grey-listing and SpamAssassin to filter mail as it arrived and I got maybe 2 or 3 a week, but the day after I moved onto the vps this shot up to between 20 and 50 a day!  I have my emails pushed straight to my phone as well so this fast became a bit of a pain.

My VPS did come with SpamAssassin pre-installed as part of Plesk but due to the licence I have installed I couldn’t use it so this caused two problems, 1) emails are not filtered for spam and 2) SpamAssassin is using up precious memory while not actually helping.

The first thing I did was to turn off SpamAssassin, it was using a lot of memory as even tho it wasn’t filtering any mail  it was still scanning every message that arrived on the server, On advice of my hosting providers tech support I decided not to un-install it in case it caused problems so I just stopped the service from running and then disabled it from auto starting on system reboot to preventing it restarting if I ever need to reboot the server.

I then tried to find the grey-listing software used on my old reseller server, this seemed to work really well so I wanted it on my server too. Support told me they were using a script put together by Brent Meisher written to work specifically with Plesk but  unfortunately the repo had been removed and I couldn’t download the files.

I was speaking with a support engineer about it and he mentioned a new tool he was playing with called SpamDyke and how it was looking promising as a replacement to their current grey-listing solution, so I decided to give it a try.

The good news is, that since I started writing this blog post, SpamDyke has been added into the atomic repositories, so to install it is as simple as using apt get or yum. Configuration is just as simple, the default settings are actually quite effective and I’ve been using them for two weeks and haven’t received a single piece of spam.

All the information you need can be found on the SpamDyke website and the README file is really useful.
This is something I defiantly recommend to everyone who is running their own mail server.

There are lots of great updates in this release and pretty much all add-ons are supported so I advise you all to update.
More details can be found at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.6/releasenotes/

While your at it, remember to upgrade to the latest version of Firefbug, there have been some great improvements in the net panel, improved timings etc and the html inspector has had a lot of updates made to it. More details can be found on http://getfirebug.com/

What is the Google Webmaster Central Channel?
Its a channel on Youtube that is used mainly by Matt Cutts (project leader of Googles web spam team) to pass on little snippets of info and answer questions made by Joe Public and his wife on the Google Forum. It is also used by other teams,  to give useful information and advise on how to make the most out of Google and the web as a whole.

Why should I watch them?
Why not? Google are market leaders in their field and they are giving advise (for free) on how to improve your website, I’ve learnt many tips and tricks from watching the videos and a lot of them have helped out a lot.

Where can I watch the videos?
Here is the answer, on YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp

We have been waiting for a mobile version of Firefox since forever, currently on WM6.1 we have a choice between using Internet Explorer 6 Mobile or Opera Mobile, There are some other browsers available but none that really tear people away from IE or Opera.  While Opera Mobile is vastly superior to IE6mobile and renders pages as a desktop browser does, it unfortunately comes with a small price tag unless bundled with your operator and so means a lot of people are stuck using IE. Fennec is about to change all that.

I’ve been playing with Fennec since its release on the 15th and  I have to say its rather good. Navigation is quick to respond and doesn’t take long to get used to, like existing mobile browser users swipe and tap the screen to pan and zoom in on pages, tabs and menu items are available by pulling the left and right edges of the screen respectively, to open side menus, this works well on a mobile device as you save space for viewing the website,  although I did find when reading some pages I accidentally opened the menus more than I’d liked.

Websites load as expected and without any particular long load times, other than the expected result of mobile browsing, I tested via WI-FI and didn’t notice any load time at all, built in javascript engine was able to handle some very javascript heavy sites like Facebook with out giving up in the way mobile IE does. I could even get Youtube working once I’d enabled plug-ins.

There is support for basic add-ons and as mentioned before tabbed browsing, both of which help to improve the mobile browsing experience although opera has had both these (tabs and widgets) for a while, Fennec seems to load them quicker than the version of opera i have installed.

The only problems i found while testing fennec were a result of my win mobile device, it seems to use a lot of memory which my poor tytnII doesnt have much of spare, am sure on the newer win mobile devices it runs fine.

Overall for an alpha development Im very impressed, the basics are already in place and Im looking forward to the next release.

Fennec is available to download here or if you don’t have a win mobile device you can install it to your desktop by grabbing a copy of the fennec desktop build.

Watch a walk through of  the new features included in the Win Mobile Alpha build courtesy of Madhava Enros

It gives some great suggestions,  also a few weird ones come out but still a great little tool.

Another post brought to you by

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Mainly so I can keep people updated as to whats happening in gavs world and also so i can keep a note of thats happening….( im starting to forget things in my old age…)

Its probably not going to be updated a lot as i dont really have time to sit here and write a diary so im going to aim for an update once a week, highlighting the main things that have happened or i found interesting.

As with any blog, i must add a few shameless plugs

• my website design portfolio
• leahs online shop
• robs club night

That will do for now, I could add a huge list but i cant be bothered.

I have just added a default template for now, i will add a site design to the list of things to do, but for now this one will suffice. As you can see its a blank canvas, I will be updating and adding content when I get time, there’s no rush as your probably the first person to read this and the next reader wont be for another week and then again it will propably be you leah…

Well its just gone 7am so that means its time to stop playing on the pc and get ready for work.

UKFast…. here I come…….     damn another shameless plug….