Scalix Forums

Probably a dumb question, However I need to know. Here at my School where I run multiple servers One of which is Scalix CE. I need to be able to Disable punk students using the Email for, shall we say questionable purposes. How do I do this?

We are going to need a little more to go on in terms of what your real requirement is here.

At the top level you always have the ability to "lock" a Scalix user account such that the user can not use e-mail.

However, I think you are asking for some form of sanctions based on mail content, similar if you like to what a SPAM filter does on external mail, e.g. reject mail containing this post will be deleted or obscene words.

Trying to scan internal mail for SPAM isn't going to be easy. Also, when you say "disable...students using email for", what action are you intending, e.g. that they can't send such mail, they can't read such mail, the mail is bounced, the admin is informed.

I think the bottom line is that this isn't going to be easy to achieve because for "internal" e-mail users are generally "trusted" to use the service appropriately. I appreciate that on a student campus a "policy" on appropriate e-mail usage might be more difficult to enforce than in a corporate enterprise.

When a student uses thier email for improper things. we need to be able to disable thier account for a term without deleteing it. However any mail still needs to be able to come in if possible. What needs to happen is that thier access is disabled not the accounts ability to recieve mail. If this is not poissible just disabling the account will work

well, this is actually fairly easy, the account can be locked from the command line.

the "-K" switch to the ommodu command provides you with the ability to lock a user's account without disabling the accounts ability to receive email (there is a separate -r switch for that!). Check "man ommodu" for details.

I believe in the next release of Scalix, this functionality will also become available in the Scalix Admin Console.

Cheers,
Florian.

For unde rabout a thousand users a great email system is Zimbra. It also has a commnuity edition and is more difficult to install... However it is still a good sytem and I witdrawl my vote from the above poll... Sorry Scalix guys.. good system still missing key features... EG built in Email filtering SPAM and Anit-Virus

I'm going to disagree with you here. I also evaluated Zimbra a few times now.

It's got a very good web client, and it's a very good prospect for email hosting, especially if you want to host lots of clients and partition them from one another.

However, the feeling I got from the evaluation was that Scalix is the more mature product. There was a lot of especially Outlook-related issues that irritated me in Zimbra that Scalix does not have.

Scalix leans towards a plugin-architecture, so you can integrate your choice of anit-virus and spam product, and not be limted by what the vendor includes. If your coorporate policy is to use eg. McAfee exclusively, it will be a lot harder in Zimbra than in Scalix. Personally I hate it when a vendor locks you into a specific range of products, because it's built-in.

Personally, I would prefer Scalix over Zimbra in a corporate environment, especially if there's lots of Outlook clients.

BTW, you did see the section in the Admin Guide on using Anti-virus software, and the Technote on Spamassassin?