Apple Mail and SMTP Offline issues

Client called me this morning, I found out that the apple mail email settings has gone awry. For some weird reasons, my SmarterMail Server settings is shown 'offline' all the time.

I tweaked, re-created account and nothing short of banging the mac on the table... and I realized that Apple Mail on the Mac OS-X (mountain-lion and above) doesn't like non-SSL based SMTP.

Gmail SMTP, or SMTP server that does not uses password authentication works well, but when SMTP authentication is enabled, it seems like a requirement for SSL to be enabled.

As such, since my server utilizes SSL (TLS Authentication) on a separate name for it's server, I had to use our own registered server name - cloudmail.b**.co*.s* and VIOLA! it worked almost immediately.

While it's a nice gesture to make the application smarter and think-ahead for it's users, I do feel that Apple should incorporate some form of warning or alerts into the Apple Mail configuration instead of simply blocking access for unsecured connectivity.

Oh well, time and efforts are already spent... glad that it is all resolved within the hour.

Applying a suitable encryption tool for systems

My client recently got upgraded and requires to be audited to ensure that it meet certain standard before further business activity can be conducted with their biggest client in the finance sector.

As their IT provider and solutions architect, I was called to the meeting and one thing that alarmed them was the lack of personal mobile device security that was not implemented for the users.

In particular - mobile and laptop encryption.

I did some reading and searches, believed that encryption will reduce the overall speed of the system, thus my fear of inefficiency and as such, never gone into encrypting the entire disk on the systems.

After reading through several posts on the solutions available, I realized that it's not that scary, and I decided to venture into the world of encrypting my laptops - at least for work!

Google-ing around the internet finds me a long-standing encryption software - TrueCrypt...which at this point at 2014-November, is dead... As such, I had to go through this post, and read through all the reports and comments all the way to the bottom.

Since I need to standardize between MAC and Windows Encryption, I decided to rest on VeraCrypt at the moment.

As of it's install at this point in time, it's currently set at version 1.00e

I did contemplate: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/bitlocker-truecrypt-encryption,2587.html

But after seeing so many people commenting/lamenting on Microsoft's bit-locker issues with releasing and revealing keys to NSA (not that it matters to me from where I am based...), I decided to give it a miss. Moreover, I needed a generic platform that can run on both MAC and WIN.

First try is on my existing Windows 7 Pro SP-1 32-bit, 4-GB of memory, on i3-370 CPU.
A 500-GB HDD - 300GB System partition (to be encrypted), and only 150GB used.
I am using AES encryption, with the standard keys configuration...

So-far so good, I have to wait 26-hrs for the work to complete. As such, I will be leaving my system over-night for this work to complete.

I shall update again if I encounter any issues.