Thunderbird + MS Exchange + Google Calendar
+ SMS/Email notifications !

Posted on November 4th, 2009 by Riaan Nolan  No Comments »

Mozilla Thunderbird with Microsoft Exchange Mail, Calendars, Address Book and Meeting Requests
+
Gmail and Google Calendar integration with Google SMS and Email Notifications.

Operating Systems:

This how-to will work on both Windows and Linux, for this tutorial we use Windows XP and Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

Benefits:

The software we have chosen are Licensed under the GPL (General Public License) it’s absolutely, 100% FREE of charge. It runs on all Operating Systems.
You can now use Thunderbird to search your Microsoft Exchange Address Book, Accept meeting requests, AND in addition, you’ll be able to sync your Calendar
to your Gmail Calendar and receive FREE SMS and Email Meeting Alerts.

Serving Suggestion:

Create a New Calendar, give your team members read/write access to that Calendar. Enable their Mobile Devices to receive SMSs. Now everyone in that team have a Share Calendar, which will notify every one in your team of new events. Viola!

ETA:

30 Minutes

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Posted in Email Marketing, Howto's, eCommerce |

Signing Email with Domainkeys and DKIM

Posted on November 2nd, 2009 by Winston  No Comments »

I am the administrator of several high volume email servers.
All of these servers use Domainkeys and DKIM to sign outgoing emails. I have put together this HOWTO in an effort to make your life a little easier. If you can’t do it, for some reason, hire me, and I’ll set it up for you.

Why do we need Domainkeys and DKIM?

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) lets an organization take responsibility for a message while it is in transit. The organization is a handler of the message, either as its originator or as an intermediary. Their reputation is the basis for evaluating whether to trust the message for delivery. Technically DKIM provides a method for validating a domain name identity that is associated with a message through cryptographic authentication.

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Posted in Email Marketing, Howto's |

Open Source at Buyx Online

Posted on October 29th, 2009 by Riaan Nolan  No Comments »

As one of my first posts on our shiny new website, I thought I’d highlight some of the technologies we use. Many of them, if not most, are licensed under some or another Open License, such as the GNU Public License.

To give you an example, Linux, is Open Source. The meaning Open Source, literally means that the application’s Source Code is available to anyone. This is an important fact. Another term to describe Open Source, is “Free Software”.

“Open Source” and “Free Software” in this context mean’s, that you are “Free” to change the code of the application. It does not refer to the price of the software. That said, many Open Source software are absolutely Free, it does not cost anything, and you are Free to change the source code.

Now, many people are not familiar with the Development Process that Software follows, and Open Source are no different. Code gets written, checked into a “Version Control” server, where some other developers “Check-out” the code, and then make changes to that code, it could be improvements, or bug fixes. That code is then again “Checked into” a “Version Control” server where the process get’s repeated.

What the above means is that Open Source code is generally very stable, and secure, and has been worked on by many people, until finally, you, the end user, can download and install the program. Examples of such programs are,

Firefox, Open Office, Java, Gimp Image Editor, Ubuntu Linux and many more ..

We at Buyx Online use Open Source applications. In fact, Open Source plays a pivotal role at Buyx Online. All our servers run Ubuntu Linux, our Database Servers run MySQL, and our Web Servers run Apache.

Our eCommerce websites are build on Magento eCommerce Platform, running on the Zend Framework. Absolutely the latest and gratest.

Our Monitoring solution, runs on an encrypted laptop, it’s only accessible to our Systems Administrators, the application runs on Nagios Network Monitor and Cacti RRD Graphs.

Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be posting more articles, and take a look at each solution in depth

Posted in Email Marketing, Howto's, Linux Systems, Server Monitoring, eCommerce |