EST. 2026 — Notes from real server work SYSADMIN · SECURITY · AI · DIRECTADMIN Issue 01
THE SYSADMIN ALMANAC
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3 articles
Mail
Ingesting Mail Without Disrupting Someone Else's Mailbox
Linux

Ingesting Mail Without Disrupting Someone Else's Mailbox

The mailbox the app fetches from is one people actually use every day — fetching with UNSEEN silently misses mail when the owner reads it on their phone before cron runs. The right approach is UID SEARCH paired with UIDVALIDITY and BODY.PEEK, with deduplication handled on our side.

#mail#imap#pop3#dovecot
10 min read·13 Oct
Mail Checks Ban the Whole Office—Fixing It with Login Auto-Whitelist
Security

Mail Checks Ban the Whole Office—Fixing It with Login Auto-Whitelist

Real mail clients behave exactly like bots — office machines keep retrying old passwords until CSF bans the whole office. This article covers an auto-whitelist system that watches for successful logins + Thai GeoIP, then grants a temporary allow for 24 hours, along with 5 pitfalls I learned the hard way.

#csf#firewall#mail#exim
9 min read·10 Jul
Tracing Dovecot IMAP/POP Failures on DirectAdmin and Keeping 90-Day Logs
Security

Tracing Dovecot IMAP/POP Failures on DirectAdmin and Keeping 90-Day Logs

A follow-up to Mail Forensics — trace IMAP/POP failures in /var/log/mail.log on DirectAdmin, distinguish stuck clients from attackers using cross-protocol ratios, and adjust logrotate to keep a full 90 days of logs instead of defaults that lose them within days

#mail#dovecot#imap#pop3
11 min read·23 May