I’ve been working pretty hard through the holidays at my full time job where I am a server administrator for a medium sized hospital in the U.S.  Recently (in December), I moved 2000+ users from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007.  We considered farming out our Exchange environment to the cloud or perhaps going with Microsoft Exchange Hosting services but in the end, upper management decided they’d rather underpay someone to work exceedingly long hours with minimal training on a system not built by him.  So, that’s why I’ve been pretty inactive as of late.  As you can imagine working with Microsoft technologies…I always have something to fix and things are always unstable.

I know that some of you might be saying “why not use linux based exchange alternatives in your enterprise?” and I’d say, why indeed.  But I inherited this beast and it’s been Exchange since Exchange came out.  Not only that, but the primary application for all departments (ERM app) runs completely on Windows and plugs into Exchange and nothing else.  Talk about vendor lock in eh?  Well, it’s a job.

I used to work with Linux when I worked for rPath but parted ways with them about a year and a half ago when I had to move away to help out after a death in the family.  I was very sad to leave but am very happy with the large pay increase that came with my current position.  However, migrations do take their toll…lots of hours worked and frustrations vented.  Now that I’m over the hump, I’ll be able to get back into a normal swing of things.

For those of you who might be Exchange administrators in your day to day work, I’ve begun blogging about my experiences and setup a community to share tips, tricks, powershell commandlets, and a place to talk shop.  I figure if I have to work with closed source at least I can open source some help.  Find my Exchange blog at http://teknologist.net

Thanks for hanging in there everyone, and sorry for the inactivity.  Now that I’ve hit 6+ years blogging (in December) here I have even more incentive to continue sharing great Linux help with everyone.  I’ve got some good tips directly in the pipeline and here’s to a great 2010!

Status Update for Devnet originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on January 5, 2010.

Search for Sender

If you’re like me, you like to group like items together in your inbox. With this extension, you can group emails from the same sender as quickly as a right click. Really, it’s just a shortcut that places the sender email up into the search box and searches for you. The nice part is, with this extension, you don’t have to type it. Quick, easy, and simple. This has quickly become an extension that I cannot live without.

SyncMab

SyncMab is an extension similar to foxmarks for Firefox. With foxmarks, you keep all your bookmarks on a central server of your choosing so that your bookmarks are the same across all computers you use that have Firefox installed. This is perfect for me since I have a set of work bookmarks and home bookmarks and like to be able to switch back and forth between them. But what about thunderbird? It doesn’t have bookmarks right? Exactly, but it does have contacts in your addressbook! So, you’ll be able to save your contacts to a server of your choosing and then on another computer with thunderbird you can synchronize your contacts by downloading that file using SyncMab. It’s brilliant and allows you to always have the same contacts across operating systems, across computers, and even to maintain multiple addressbooks

Display Quota

This extension will display a small graphic in Thunderbird that tells you how much space you have left in your IMAP mail account and can warn you when you get close to filling up. This might not be too useful for those of you that use IMAP with huge quotas (gmail) but for others, it may be. I have heard that some users do not like the popup that displays for warning on this extension. For those users, Thunderbird has a built in function you can enable:

Open your configuration editor in Thunderbird and find the following keys:

1. mail.quota.mainwindow_threshold.show – % when quota should show up
2. mail.quota.mainwindow_threshold.warning – % when quota becomes yellow
3. mail.quota.mainwindow_threshold.critical – % when quota becomes red

Thanks to goddess-gate.com for information on how to do this.

Sender Verification

With the sender verification extension…you can verify that the email that has been sent actually came from the sender. This extension goes out and checks the domain in the FROM field and makes sure that the email originated from this address.

Does it work 100% of the time? No. But for a majority of emails, this extension will make sure that someone hasn’t spoofed an email address in your addressbook to bypass your spam filters. The extension uses Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DNS-based reputation lists to make it’s decision and report back to you.

I opened up the preferences for this extension and made sure to toggle “Show verification results in statusbar” so that on the bottom of every email, SVE results display. This even works for previewing mail messages in the preview pane. You can also set individual white lists of domains not to check.

In all, quite a handy anti-phishing extension to make Thunderbird just a bit more secure.

What Obscure Extensions Do You Use?

What obscure extensions do you use to customize your inbox? How do youe extend thunderbird to do your bidding? How does it help you take charge of an unruly inbox? Please share your comments with us here and let us know the steps you’ve taken to rule over your emails.

4 Little Known Thunderbird Extensions originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on June 25, 2008.

If you don’t have Zimbra, they have a free Open Source Community Edition available. It’s feature rich and quite configurable for your email. It can even be used to retrieve multiple email sources and bring them all into one place…it also has identity management so you can send from multiple accounts. Very nice stuff.

“I use Thunderbird for my email client. It’s quite speedy and nice. Coming from various places of employment that used Outlook and Exchange, I miss being able to schedule appointments via my email client (of course, with Zimbra, I’m able to do this via the web interface..but I like using Thunderbird for its ability to sort and
handle my email).

Enter Lightning, the sunbird-like extension for Thunderbird. So how does one integratelightning with say, Zimbra? It was rather simple and easy to do so. I’m posting what I did to get this up and running so that others won’t fumble through the Zimbra forums trying to piece various posts together finally arriving at a solution after banging heads against the wall repeatedly. Note that I’m assuming you use Zimbra/Thunderbird with IMAP.

Zimbra and Thunderbird Preparation

To get things rolling, install Lightning, the extension from Mozilla AND install the Provider Add on Extension for Thunderbird as well. This Provider Add on Extension also works for Google Calendar (or so it is blogged about often). I’m assuming that you know how to install Thunderbird extensions (which are different than Firefox ones) and that you’ve been able to install both of those plugins in the order listed.

Open Zimbra and browse to your calendar. Right click it and choose “share calendar”. You don’t need to actually share your calendar because you’ll need to provide your login and password initially when connecting…so you’ll be able to login as yourself through Thunderbird/Lightening…you just need to copy the URL at the bottom of the pop-up window that appears when you choose share calendar. So copy that URL and switch back to your Thunderbird email client.

Thunderbird/Lightning Config

After restarting when you installed the extensions above, you’ll see the lightening calendar bar in your default view. Click on Calendars and you’ll see there is one called ‘home’. This is your default one. Let’s add a calendar…click on ‘New’. Choose “On The Network” for your location.

Next, choose icalendar (ICS) and input the URL you copied from the previous step in the blank and click Next. Give the calendar a unique name and pick a color (I’m partial to green), click next, then click finish. It should prompt you for a login and password…make sure you use your Zimbra Login and Password.

Zimbra Config

None needed…everything is ready to go.

Tidbits of Handy Information?

There is one downside I’ve found so far. When you create an appointment in Lightning, it creates it as an ICS attached email…so it’s not completely integrated. You’ll need to send out your appointments like this. It also warns you that the appointment has already been added to your calendar when hitting the accept button…which is odd but it works just fine and ignoring this small problem is easy.

Integrate the ReminderFox extension with Thunderbird to give you reminder pop-ups for all your appointments and tasks

I hooked into my google calendar so I could view my personal appointments (go to DMV, pay bill, etc) as well as my work appointments. Instructions for hooking into Google calendar are here.

If you have problems connecting your Zimbra calendar, look at NAT for the problems. Think about opening up the right ports in your firewalls to allow access to IMAP and think of the proper FQDN for your server. You may have to use IP address instead if things are in a DMZ/orange zone.”

I hope this gives this post a bit more exposure as many people often wonder how to hook Zimbra and their Google Calendar into Thunderbird.

Zimbra or Google Calendar with Thunderbird and Lightning originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on September 11, 2007.