It works.  That’s all we can say.  It is difficult to set up and it is slow once it is set up.  It “can” do it, so here’s how you “can” make it do it.

We only tested from a “clean” install of Windows Ten (10, X).  The first time run of mail starts a “First Time” or “Out Of Box” experience that you will only ever see the real “first time.”  If you add an account and then delete it, Mail App then loads with an “empty” workspace and everything has to be done manually.  Throughout this post we use “click” to mean tap or click.

Here are the steps we followed – screenshots follow in order:

1. Click inside the “Search Area / Address Bar” (next to the “Start/Windows Logo”) and type “mail”. Click “Mail – Trusted Windows Store app” at the top of the menu/search results.
2. Click on “+ Add account” on the “First Time/Let’s Get Started” screen
3. Click on “Other account – POP, IMAP”
4. Put in your full email address and password. Click the “Sign-in” button.
   Note: make sure your password is correct, it is very important to not causing syncing errors and extremely long delays when finished.
5. The first time – after a pretty long delay – you will get a message that says: We couldn’t find info for that account. Make sure the email address is correct and try again.  Click the “Sign-in” button two-to-three more times until “Sign-in” changes to “Advanced”. (5th image)
6. Click “Advanced” to get to the scrolling “Internet email account” screen.
7. Give your account a name (this is what it be called “locally”).
8. Enter “Your name” (this is what you want to appear when people receive email from you).
9. “Incoming email server” should be your domain name (everything after the @ in your email address) or mail.yourdomainname.ext[ention]  (the mail. is optional)
10. Change the “Account type” from IMAP to POP3
11. Scroll down until you see “Username” and “Password” (those should be there) and “Outgoing (SMTP) email server”.  Your outgoing server is the same as your incoming server.  You can use the domain name only (everything after the @ in your email address) or the optional mail. prefix plus your domain name.
12. Scroll down to the bottom and take the check-marks out of the “Require SSL” (incoming and outgoing) boxes.  Leave the top two check-marks in place.  See: Picture 8.
13. Click on “Sign-in” and you will be returned to the “First things first…” screen.
14. Click on “Ready to go” (picture 9) and…
15. Your first “big problem and delay” appears.  It took almost 20 minutes for our test computer to “time out” and give us the “Your account settings are out of date” alert/notification. There is nothing you can do but wait it out.  Once the alert appears with the [Fix Account] and [Dismiss] buttons, click on Fix Account.  (Picture 10)
16. Fixing the account consists of clicking the “Continue” button on the “Untrusted certificate” screen.  (Picture 11)  If you click cancel nothing will work and you’ll have to figure out how to delete the account and start over without the “First things first” screen.
17. Finally, here is the importance of that password (back at step 4).  We – on purpose – entered it incorrectly to “see what happens.”  BOOM! That’s what happens.  Another 20+ minutes for the timeout on the incoming server, then again (total 40+ minutes) for the outgoing server’s timeout.  In the meantime we got “blocked” from the mail server for “Too many failed AUTH attempts”.  During that 20 minutes of “Still working on it…” the “Mail app” was trying to log in hundreds of times per second with the wrong password.  After just over 40 minutes we got another Alert/Notification that “Your account settings are out of date”.  Fix this time was entering the correct password.  Once done, the “Inbox” sync-ed almost instantly, then 20 more minutes and the same “block” from the server because “Mail app” did not “fix” incoming and outgoing servers the first time.  Alert again, fix again (this time we dismissed it and manually fixed it by clicking the “gear” icon and going to the Account Settings). Somewhere around one hour and forty-five minutes later, mail sent and received.

Of other note: The “Mail app” does not appear to delete the mail from the server.  This is good – and – bad.  It’s good if you have multiple devices checking the same account.  It’s bad if you delete mail from the server from your other devices.  The “re-sync-ing” of mail that is the Inbox of “Mail app” and no longer at the server is a very, very, very long and slow process.  We only had one message, removed it from the server via webmail, it took “Mail app” 7 minutes to “sync” (remove the one message from Inbox and do whatever background database or file “magic” it does during “Still working on it…”).

So, there it is, the pictures are next, and here is one more recommendation/reminder from us:  You can use the “Mail app” in Windows Ten (10, X) for your ComputerMedic.org hosted email (POP3/SMTP) – it is a lot easier to use a 3rd party app (or program) like Mozilla’s Thunderbird. ( https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/ )

You’re a bad bot. I’m tired of playing with you. I’m going to make you dead now.

July, 2014.  The internet is a secluded village, all controlled and terrorized by one boy…

Meet Anthony, from the ‘It’s a Good Life’ episode of The Twilight Zone (Nov. 1961).  Details over at imdb, or watch the whole episode (with modernized commercial/ad inserts) at hulu.

We’ve hired Anthony, now in his 50s to do away with spam, Zombie DNS DDoS Bots, and other such pests buzzing around and annoying or destroying everything and everyone in the internet play ground.  We should have thought of it earlier… Just making bad things dead or wishing them into the cornfield.

OK, not quite that easy, here’s what’s up in the fight against Spam-Nados and Zombie Bots…

[Thermal] Inversion Layers.  In the undersea world of submariners these separations between temperatures of water mask objects from sonar and/or, of course, thermal imaging.  What does that have to do with servers and DDoS attacks? Nothing.  Except the association is how we remember:

Inverse Tactics.  At some point around the Happy Holiday Season 2013-2014 (aka Christmas to normal people) a server manager woke from a horrible holiday dream – a dream of fail2ban memory leaks, dead sockets, out of memory errors and massive log files – with a vision of a less nightmarish future.  Simplicity was unmasked.  The fortune-cookie like note that comes from the bobble-head-devil fortune machine in that other episode of Twilight Zone:

Invert your tactics.

Instead of trying to use fail2ban (perl/python/loosely interpreted regexs) to sift through everything and lock out the bad guys after they had been bad, and possibly then wrong because UDP sources are easily spoofed; use the ‘firewall’ (compiled, close to the kernel, strict iptables) as a firewall.  Seems simple, use the firewall as the firewall. But that’s hind-sight.

So, simple, use the firewall, invert the tactics.  What does that mean?

It means: allow only certain things along the ‘port 53 chain’ ~ only the domains that we truly are the authoritative host for.  And, since our little web-server is also a recursive-caching DNS server for itself and others; only do this filtration on the ‘net-facing’ (public) adapter.  Confused? Good. Welcome to the Twilight Zone.

Inverted logic:
– Old way: allow everything, find anything ‘known bad’ and block that; ever growing list of ‘known bad’ (because the bad-bot guys change what they query you to death with)
– New way: allow only the domains we NS host to be allowed passed iptables to get to bind/named and furthermore to fail2ban; drop all other (not known good) DNS queries.  Yep; drop; no tarpit, no ‘channel[s] closed’, no loopback, no reply, no nothing, DEEeee-ROP. (Wish bad queries into the corn field.)

Simple. Smart. Effective.  Can’t find the notes to give credit to some very helpful websites/pages that helped us through this “seems simple (everything computer is supposed to be simple)” but was very, very complicated set of iptables rules. TODO for later: find the notes, give the credit.

Here’s the summary:
– iptables does string matching (the * here is that iptables string matching on UDP sockets is very complicated, based on hex conversions of the strings, very strict, but very fast)
– set up a new ‘table (chain)’ and set of ‘RETURN’ rules based on the domains we actually want to give answers to DNS queries for
– set up the new ‘table (chain)’ to default to DROP (not reject, not return) all others

Here’s the implementation, using the plain text matching of iptables instead of the complete domain.tld (the dots don’t translate so you have to use hex to match domain(special)tld):

#!/bin/sh
#
# create the chain to drop everything we don't specifically know
if ! iptables -L netdnswash -n  >/dev/null 2>&1 ; then
        #echo "debugging make the chain netdnswash"
        iptables -N netdnswash
fi
# flush it either way
iptables -F netdnswash
# default rule = DROP.  This is to stop trying to block badbots, only allow good stuff.
# This should also drop the '.' (single dot) query
iptables -A netdnswash -j DROP
### during build/testing return everything, watch the counters on the one-two test domains
### iptables -A netdnswash -j RETURN
# put the most common ones up top (e.g. computermedic.org since that's the name server, then down to the least busy)
# reverse order because inserts stack on top
iptables -I netdnswash -i eth1 -p udp -m udp --dport 53 -m string --algo bm --icase --to 255 --string 'mldragon' -m comment --comment "mldragon.com" -j RETURN
iptables -I netdnswash -i eth1 -p udp -m udp --dport 53 -m string --algo bm --icase --to 255 --string 'computermedic' -m comment --comment "computermedic.org always first" -j RETURN
# make sure this is first in the INPUT chain - returns to INPUT will allow fail2ban to catch crap.gooddomain.tld
# make sure that fail2ban (actions) build their rules at/after 2. More manual thinking for fail2ban (admins) but way less work
# make sure it doesn't already exists
if ! iptables -L INPUT -n | grep 'netdnswash' -c 2>&1 ; then
        #echo "debugging make the rule in INPUT"
        iptables -I INPUT 1 -i eth1 -p udp -m udp --dport 53 -j netdnswash
fi

Note 1: all chain creation prior to adding it to the INPUT chain rules.
Note 2: only traffic on the ‘net-facing/public’ adapter goes through here (at the bottom, …eth1…)
Note 3: used inserts ( -I ) so what you want first you have to put last in the script (invert again)
Note 4: once fully tested and put into operation: iptables-save >/path/to/conf_file so that if the server restart iptables doesn’t have to be ‘re-made’.
Note 5: change the fail2ban jail create/destroy commands to insert at 2, so fail2ban can be restarted without messing up the new iptables stuff.

Now, important, the lack of the complete domain.tld business.  If we had hundreds or thousands of Ns in our NS we would go through the trouble to use ‘hex string matching’ to get the whole computermedic.org thing in there.  But the “less than hundreds” number of domains on this server lets us deal with the occasional bad bot playing computermedic.tld [other than org] games.  How do we deal with that?

fail2ban of course.  Now, much relaxed and under-loaded because no more rolling/spoofed-source DNS/DDoS querries.  Again, don’t want to tell the bad-guys how to defeat our newly created defensive systems, but suffice it to say: if you run 3 or more ddosasia.computermedic.org or www999, www998, www997 (the rolling ones we encountered) queries against the server fail2ban is going to shut you down (1st time for 2 hours, 2nd time for… drumroll… Evuh!).  First the cornfield for a reasonable timeout, then fail2bAnthony makes you dead.

Less Spammy Inboxes version 14.7 (year.month versioning because there have been way too many versions)

I hate anybody that doesn’t like me!

Now that fail2bAnthony has less DNS problems on his hands, lots of free memory and CPU cycles, has not gone to swap in at least 3 months it’s time to put fail2bAnthony on task of wishing spambots into the cornfield, and those dreaded three-headed-gophers (the guess your password bots that then use your email to send spam everywhere ‘authenticated’): Dead.

fail2ban was already working the ‘mail servers logfiles’ to identify bad auth attempts and ban bad guys there.  However! We utilize an ‘Anti-Spam Relay/Filter Server’ (or several) and a great many of the bad auth attempts were going to those.  A couple of new fail2ban filters and actions, done.  Send legit email if you want copies of the fail2ban files, not publishing those (x-th time: don’t give the bad-guys a ‘how we defend ourselves’ map).  We’ll suffice it to say in this regard: had to get a few users new passwords, but ‘rejects’, bad server reputation points, and dictionary/rolling login attempts, junk in the mailq, against all mail systems are significantly decreased.  Will be even more decreased as time goes by because after certain re-bans, ips and whole ranges are banned for 1 year (all ports).  Cornfield, cornfield, dead.

A little over a year ago we said ‘Finally…’ ( http://www.computermedic.org/?p=9 ).  Doing all of this iptables, fail2ban, named (forgot to mention above, no more spoofed/loop-back entries in named conf files because no more bad domains/tlds allowed through), mail/spam server tuning revealed a major problem in the spam filter/relay setup: SenderBase did not install last year.  ‘Hypothetically speaking’ we could pretend that we use a certain Anti-Spam SMTP Proxy ( ASSP ) and we ‘hypothetically’ used their install/update scripts to get the thing moving.  Well, in those 12-18 days of extreme server configs and installs and the months of Zombie-Bot and DDoS-Nado wars after, the one little message in a log file seldom read about Net::SenderBase not being available was missed. Then there is the fact that ASSP ‘hypothetically’ does not log (even if debug level logging is selected) anything about SenderBase if it was not available at startup.  Where the problem lies: in some nix distros the install/update scripts, and the howto pages, that say use MCPAN to install Net::SenderBase don’t warn you to watch the output carefully to make sure there wasn’t any error[s].  Here’s the deal, and a warning: Watch the output of install Net::SenderBase carefully!!  If there are errors (any error means no SenderBase, no filters, regex matching, country matching, scoring, based on SenderBase in ASSP, and nothing to let you know): force install Net::SenderBase.

Bam. Done, had to go back an re-tweak/un-tweak about 12,000 ASSP (hypothetically) settings, logs, regex-es, etc., that had been tweaked trying to figure out why so much wasn’t working, gave ASSP a full stop (/etc/init.d/assp stop), let it rest a minute, fired it back up (replace stop with start) and wah-lah! 79% blocked instead of 45-51%.  Less spammy inboxes.

Updated wordpress to 3.9.1 today.
Not important but it works *great* in IE11.  Makes links correctly, which it did not.  Looks a little better.  Good job wordpress.

The digital world has out-run squirrel:

• Does not work fully with Internet Explorer 11
• Does not work fully with mac and iDevices (pod, phone, pad, OSX (**ok with Mozilla or firefox on OSX but no one runs that)
• Does not work fully with [An]Droid devices
• Does not work fully with Surface (trimmed IE 10/11)

So, 1.11.14 we installed and tested version 0.9.5 of roundcube.

Hosted at MLD/CMI? Check it out at [www.yourdomain.xyz]/rcmail or, for example:

http://www.computermedic.org/rcmail

Log in using your full email address as username (just like squirrel).

After your first log in you should go to the settings screen and turn on HTML composition and viewing and set your signature options (if you keep using roundcube).

Both work fine side-by-side, but you should not be logged in with both at the same time.

Link at the top/right soon.

We have had to turn back on/up as many of the filters and blocks as possible because the “spam load” on some of the users (including the admin) is overwhelming.

Some of your contacts may get ‘rejections’ or ‘bounces’ if their servers are identified as “blacklisted” (DNSBL).  If you have any reports from your friends about problems email support@computermedic.org and we’ll get them whitelisted.

Q: Why?
A: Because gmail, yahoo and aol have managed to get their servers listed in Uniform Resource Identifier Blacklist (URIBL) databases. **

The Q/A above leads to the P/S below (as distasteful as it may be).

Problem: gmail (google), yahoo and aol [and others] are URIBL blocked by the spam filters/servers, we all want email from our friends at gmail, yahoo and (yes, still) aol.
Solution: turn off URIBL blocking at the spam filters/servers. (Throw IN the bad bathwater with the good?)

Someday, maybe, the internet will be a better more friendly place to live.  Until then, a few more *Junk* emails every day.

** gmail, yahoo and aol do not provide ‘easy platforms’ for spammers, phishers and junk/bulk email proliferators; they get listed on these ‘block lists’ by their competitors, odd-balls that hate big companies and goofy, immature people that have nothing better to do.