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Source Code

This is the real meat-and-bones of this whole project. In order to get these modules to work together, you will need to make some (relatively easy) changes as listed in the installation notes. It is vital that your MTA and POP3 daemons output lines to syslog that popAuth3 can interpret and act upon. Alternatively, it is equally important that the regular expressions within popAuth3 match those mail log lines appropriately.

popauth3; Current Version: 3.0.1

The popAuth3 project is comprised of several files including the core source (and license file), report generation utilities, and various support scripts. At a minimum, you need the core source and the copyright license files. All other files can be considered optional as they are not required by the core source file to do its work. Note: Microsoft Internet Explorer treats *.pl files as executable (and may prevent you from viewing them). You must right-click, then select "Save As" in order to download these files. The files are listed and described as (install them as specified on the install page):

• Minimal
  • popauth.pl -- The core source file (this is the main program).
  • COPYING -- The copyright license file.
• Recommended
  • popauth.log -- Named after the log file that popAuth3 generates, this is the logrotate support file that enables you to rotate popAuth3's log files (to avoid filling up your HDD on a single huge file).
• Optional: Reporting
  • listsessions.pl -- Nicely displays all authenticated relay sessions, showing a lot of useful information about each session.
  • listrbl.pl -- Nicely displays the entire contents of the local RBL cache, showing a lot of useful information about each RBL entry (i.e.: Why black-listed, when, whether null-routed/for how long, etc).
  • listrepeats.pl -- Nicely displays only those RBL cache entries which have repeatedly attempted to contact your mail server (useful to see any entries that are, have been, or will be null-routed).
  • removerblentry.pl -- Used by listrbl.pl and listrepeats.pl to remove entries from the local RBL cache. Unfortunately, you will have to do this from time to time -- user error happens. NOTE: This requires that the directory that contains the RBL cache data file be world writable! This is exactly why I moved my cache files into a directory separate from the remaining postfix configuration files.
  • listreport.css -- Cascading Style Sheet used by the HTML report output for in-browser display.
  • printable.css -- Cascading Style Sheet used by the HTML report output for printing.
  • index.html-sample -- A sample HTML document to illustrate how you might access the various HTML report utilities listed above.
• Optional: Support
  • poplog -- A simple tailer script to watch popAuth3's log file in real-time.

Internet Explorer Users: If you are unable to view/download the source files listed above, a .ZIP archive of the popAuth3 source tree, as presented on this web site, is available here. Right-Click, Save As... to download it.

vm-pop3d

You will need to make some changes to three source files for vm-pop3d to log POP authentications on one line. Several people have reported tweaks like this to the vm-pop3d developer mailing list, but I made this change before I discovered their versions. My version reports everything needed to establish enough data for popAuth3's use, so it is good enough. When commenting someone else's code, I tend to put my initials and a time-date stamp on or near the lines that I alter, clearly labeling changes that I have made. If you are interested in what I changed, then you are welcome to find my initials, WWK, in these source files. Otherwise, just replace your copies of these files and recompile vm-pop3d as recommended in its INSTALL file. The changed files are:

• user.c
• vm-pop3d.c
• vm-pop3d.h

Internet Explorer Users: If you are unable to view/download the source files listed above, a .ZIP archive of these three source files is available here. Please note this is not the complete vm-pop3d program source! Right-Click, Save As... to download it.

The Future

As with any major source project, I have other objectives for popAuth3. Namely, I hope to achieve:

1. Separate the configuration values from the source code into a separate popauth.conf file. Have this file stored either in /etc/ or in/etc/popauth/.
2. Generalize popAuth3 such that it can be more readily applied to MTAs other than postfix. I'm going to need configuration examples from people actually using popAuth3 with these other MTAs to accomplish this because I am strictly a postfix user.
3. Find a way to run popAuth3 as a user other than root. You'll note that everything above assumes you will install popAuth3 as root, and popAuth3 will run as root. While it works in this context, and many other similar tools do as well, I just want to go out and try this for the sake of even tighter security control.
4. Move the local RBL cache, session tracking file, and fisher tracking files to a MySQL data store rather than the current flat-file format. Better yet, make it optional whether to use flat-files or an RDBMS.
5. Write a fully featured installer for popAuth3. Granted, there is only so much that can be done for this. For example, it is unlikely that an installer can be written that will automatically generate the regular expressions needed within the popAuth3 source to match any given POP daemon. However, it would be nice to automatically handle most of the installation procedure such as path detection, directory creation, data file initialization, FIFO & syslog preparation, etc.
6. While I'm of the mind set that production Linux servers shouldn't have GUIs, it would be nice to have a GUI manager for popAuth3 for editing it's configuration, restarting it, and editing the RBL cache file (perhaps a network version that can be run from workstations to manipulate these files on the server).
7. Carefully consider and implement user change/feature requests based on feedback.