Quandry of the Evolution o' Thunderbird

Evolution is the messaging component of GnomeOffice, a full fledged suite running on the Gnome platform. Add-ons are built-in and to me looks to require a new download for new features.

Thunderbird is the Mozilla Foundation's premier email application that can have extended features via add-in's in a framework that makes it possible to even be compatible with Firefox.

Part of work actually requires some monitoring of URLs in spammed emails and I was looking to bridge a gap between office spam and the volume of spam being received in several personal spam honeypots.

Enter IMAP.

Thanks to being able to setup multiple accounts on Microsoft Outlook its possible to just move all received spam into a separate account folder via a rule -- in theory. Right now I've not gotten down to fully doing this as due to the amount of list mails I do receive in my work mail its just easier to monitor the Spam and Junk folder before manually moving to an IMAP shared folder.

Enter Search Filters.

I've been using Thunderbird for some time and have gotten used to its quirks on the Windows platform (ie. storage limitation or errors) so having this run on Kubuntu was not too bad. In fact I noticed some speed increase and stability moving back to the original intended Linux platform. As for Evolution, this is somewhat new to me and I've done some really light tinkering with earlier versions.

The race however is the ability to script and automate as well as how better (how many buttons and clicks) it is to get a filter in place and start to search for "finds" (ie. bot links, phishing, droppers, etc.). Apparently though Thunderbird's extension provides for making quick filters, its message indexing speed is slow. Note I am basically "grepping" more than 30k worth of spam at any one time accumulated over the years. Evolution's performance surprisingly is a bit better in terms of displaying found messages and though limited add-ons makes it a more stable platform to do queries. In short, damn!

More food for thought as I immerse myself more into the Linux world that this Macbook Pro am typing on runs beautifully and expensively...

Apple Time Machine, Back to the Past

Thats right, the first thing about the Macbook Pro to blog about is the backup software called "Time Machine". Its an interesting concept on Mac OS X similar to System Restore on Windows XP with a plus.

The main complaint so far has been that Apple wants you to use their own brand of backup drives (a) when the reality is that most modern homes right now are probably running a NAS or other network storage device. What is worse, if you do decide to do option (b) then you may end up having to format that external storage using the proprietary Mac OS X file system.

Thats easy enough to fix by modifying a registry entry to allow an unofficial modification (c). Not one to be limited, thats exactly what I did to redirect storage to my Promise NS4300N. The transfer time over the network though is understandably slower than direct plugged (and even worse if you're really pushing your luck like I am via wireless-N).

SIMS to be a Hacintosh?

After a few weeks playing around compatibility questions, I decided to take the challenge and see if my old ThinkPad X40 was up to the task of running any version of Mac OS X. This is the actual machine, not using VMware like suggested in other forums. This was to take advantage of whatever resources from the laptop itself.

I recently got Yna a Macbook from eBay and must say its a very exciting piece of equipment. My thoughts on that later ....

Now there are perfectly legitimate reasons for doing this, my primary motive is to have an exposed machine out there that I could use for work to surf all those bad Mac sites and to have it catch all the bad stuff that a normal Mac user would face. Most recently ZLOB and DNSchanger were seen in the wild having crossed over from the Microsoft Windows platform (sorry Mac zealots, your false sense of security is what we call "denial"). So creating a "MacPot" or "ApplePot" if you will.

To test performance, I installed a copy of The Sims for Mac. As you can see here the graphics work. In terms of speed and response its almost at par with the Macbook even though it had a newer processor. The reason? More RAM. My X40 has 1GB of it while Yna's Macbook as only about 512MB. That should be a clue for later projects involving speed, eh?