Projects

Here are some of my work-related and/or personal projects. If I have some time between jobs, I like to work on personal projects and get involved in voluntary work for several organizations and events. The experience I gain from these activities also helps me at my work. I have consciously chosen a mix of very different old and young projects for this page to show you the spectrum of my work.

Antispam Study for the BSI

In the autumn of 2004 I was contracted by the German Government Office for Security in Information Technology (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik, BSI) to write a study on the subject of "Spam". I was the project manager and also wrote large parts of the content. I was supported by five co-authors.

The study explains the technical, financial and legal background of the spam menace and explains the function of the many existing antispam measures. It also contains recommendations which technical and organizational measures should be used. Its intended audience are postmasters, system administrators and IT decision makers.

The 170 page study is written in German and was presented in May 2005 under the title "Antispam-Strategien" (antispam strategies). It is available from the publisher or through book shops. A free PDF version can be downloaded from the BSI web site.

Info portal "AllThingsEmail"

The sparse information available on the Internet about the technology of email communications is often hard to find. To help remedy this I have been working in my free time on the email information portal AllThingsEmail.org.

The site has lists of books, articles, papers, RFCs and lots of other information about email. Also a large link collection included from the Open Directory Project and a Wiki. The portal should help everybody who is interested in email technology, be it for his work or out of personal interest. Time permitting I keep improving and extending the site.

A Mail System for Schlund+Partner/1&1

Based on my experience from setting up the first scalable mail system for the then just starting Internet activites of T-Online, a branch of the (former monopoly) German Telekom, I designed and implemented the new mail system for the web hosting company Schlund+Partner in 1998 and 1999. After the company was bought by 1&1 their mail system was integrated also. See my article (in German) "Briefsortierer. Hunderttausende E-Mails pro Tag unter Linux" in the German computer magazine iX 11/1999 for some technical information. In the following years the mail system has grown tremendously and was extended by me and S+P staff.

For this project I developed the highly scalable POP3 server and proxy "POPular". Because of its efficient and cluster-enabled architecture this software could be used for years bei Schlund+Partner/1&1 with their millions of mailboxes. At some point development on POPular ceased and the software is now obsolete because of new developments. In 2005 S+P/1&1 moved to a new software which supports IMAP and other improvements.

POPular is available under a GPL free software licence from my web site. Some of the innovations of this software are described in my paper Designing Server Software for Zero Downtime that I presented at the SANE 2002 conference in Maastricht.

sage@guug Karlsruhe

Every two months from 2001 until 2004 I organized the meetings of the sage@guug Karlsruhe. Usually there are two talks per evening with a break in between for a snack and the "networking" between participants. The meetings were (and are) free of charge and open for everybody. Most of the participants are system administrators or have similar jobs. The usually 40-50 participants are mostly from the Karlsruhe area, but occasionally there are visitors from farther away like Stuttgart or Darmstadt. In 2005 the job of the organizer was passed on to somebody else, because I wanted more time for other projects.

More information about this event is available from the sage@guug Karlsruhe website and in the article SAGE-KA: The Early Years (in German), that I wrote in October 2002 for the UpTimes, the membership magazine of the German Unix User Group (GUUG e.V.).