Mails

The Horde framework is a great tool if you need a collaboration suite which is accessible from all over the world. In newer versions, Horde provides an rpc service which can be used to sync calendar-entries, contacts and notes.

I use a Nokia 5230 with an Symbian S60 5. Edition. It gives me the opportunity to sync my contacts, calendar and notes via SyncML. Wouldn't it be great to sync these with horde, so you have always the same calendar, even if you're offline?

Basically, all you have to setup is this:

• open Menu > Settings > Connectivity > Data transfer > Sync (Menü > Einstellungen > Verbindungen > Datentransfer > Sync in German)
• add a new sync profile with
• name: Horde
• version: 1.1
• channel: Internet
• connection: default
• server address: https://path/to/horde/rpc.php
• port: 443
• username: your horde login name
• password: your horde login password
• contact database: contacts
• calendar database: calendar
• notes database: notes
• (keep the default values for the rest)

Well, I would not blog about it, if it worked in the first try. My Phone said "connection error" ("Verbindungsfehler" in German). I google'd a few hours and found out only one important note: If you create a directory /tmp/sync, then horde will log some debug-output there. Horde did, and as far as I understood the files, they looked okay.

It was rather an accident that I found out what the problem was. It seems, by cellphone can't decompress HTML-Streams. In the horde administration, select "configuration" and open the "Horde (horde)" settings. Make sure that in the "general"-Tab in the "PHP Settings" section there is no tick at $conf[compress_page]. After I removed the settings, my cellphone was happy. And me too

Have I already noted that I love Jabber? Jabber is relly great, and sometime I will write my own bot framework for it. In my oppinion jabber has great opportunities beyond pure chatting. I use Jabber as a kind of notification system for several things. E.g. for nagios (german). And since thunderbird consumes lots of ram only to show a notification about incoming mails, I decided to search a solution to provide Jabber notifications.

I guess nearly every admin of a webserver knows the article ISP-style Email Server with Debian-Etch and Postfix 2.3 from workaround.org. I use a similar setup (with different pathes) for my private mailserver. I have a number of users and accounts and on some days I get a pretty high number of spam.

Step 11 of the tutorial shows an example how to automatically learn spams and ham. But I think, one can do this better.