This article will show you how to dramatically improve the effectiveness of the anti-spam system that is built into Mac OSX Server 10.5. After the upgrade, at least 99.9% of spam should be prevented from reaching your user’s e-mail Inboxes.

This process requires that the Developer Tools are installed on the system. As always, backup your server before making any changes.

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This is the third out of four articles on integrating Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) Server with an external, UNIX-based LDAP server in a way that the collaboration services — wikis, blogs and calendars — in Mac OSX are available for users and groups in the external LDAP directory as if they were native users.

The first article describes how to add the appropriate Apple LDAP schema to your external directory. The second article describes how to set up appropriate partitions (e.g., cn=config, ou=MacOSX…) in your external directory to hold data from the Apple server. This article tackles the augmentation of user records in the external directory so that OSX Server recognizes them as native users.

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Some people are pretty enthusiastic about the idea of Second Life as a next-generation world wide web. I attended one talk at WWW2007 (part of Monday’s WOW Tutorial) that included a large segment on Second Life and its potential as an online marketing medium for business.

I got the impression that the speaker was just a big fan of the game. There is certainly some potential for marketing in the game, however there are also a lot of drawbacks to doing so, such as malicious users or unscrupulous competitors doing anti-social things with their virtual characters in front of your virtual storefront/presentation/sales-pitch/whatever.

A significant difference between the web and second life, that was not pointed out, is that Second Life is a virtual environment that is owned by a single company that controls all aspects of that environment. The web is decentralized and free. That is what makes the web special. If some open-source and distributed model that were similar to Second Life could emerge, then maybe there could be some resemblance.

Until then, however, I think that second life is really a fringe thing for people who really like their second lives, or who don’t much like their first ones. :)