WordPress is a very popular open-source blog software and is used widely throughout the Internet. However, with great success comes great attack potential: like any other wide spread open-source software, WordPress is target for frequent hacking attacks and spam-bots. All the more important is it to always update the distribution to the latest release.

As Debian/Ubuntu user, I am spoiled when it comes to update management: apt-get updates most of my software, and apticron notifies me when updates are available. For WordPress however, the packaged versions of Debian/Ubuntu are really old and less adjustable which unfortunately makes a manual installation inevitable. While there are several automated WordPress update mechanisms out there, I couldn’t find a simple notify-on-update tool.

This post introduces the WordPress Update Notifier (WP-UN), a simple script that frequently compares the installed WordPress version with the latest available one. If a new version is available, it sends an e-mail to a given address.

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Greylisting is a very efficient technique for fighting spam and can reduce the spam messages in your mailbox by more than 90%. It uses the fact that most spammers only try delivering their spam-mails once, whereas real mail transfer agents (such as the ones regular e-mail service providers are using) try delivering each message up to 4-5 days before they give up.

I have always wondered why most ESPs don’t offer greylisting for their mailboxes, but only rely on less effective and resource-hungry post-retrieval filter methods. Unfortunately, my e-mail provider is one of them so that I get at least a couple of spam mails a day …

Luckily, it is very easy to set up your own mail relay with greylisting support, i.e. a mail server that simply forwards the mail to your real provider once it passes the greylist-filter.

This little tutorial describes how to set up Postfix and SQLgrey as mail relay.

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Roundcube is an AJAX/PHP based e-mail application which is really flexible and easy to use in comparison to other free web based solutions.

For the customer interface of Silversun, I wanted to use RC as the internal web mail application and therefore had to embed it into my system. To avoid that the customer has to log in twice (customer interface and Roundcube), I had to simulate the login request with a PHP script.

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