You have probably seen the ads for email reading programs. They claim that you can get rich by simply reading a few emails each day and hundreds of thousands of people sign up for these programs. Exactly how legit are these businesses? Can you really earn money by just reading an email or two?

The way email reading services work is that they offer clients a certain number of hits to their websites. The clients pay for this service and the site then turns around and pays people like you to receive emails which must be opened and have a specific link clicked on in order to qualify. You usually have to stay on the advertiser’s site for 30-60 seconds before your hit is counted and you will be paid.

In general, reading and clicking an email is not a high paid job. You end up getting somewhere between half a cent and 3 cents per email that you open, if you perform the requested action.

Even if you are willing to work for such low pay, you need to be aware that many of these websites are not as great as they might look at first glance. Apart from sending you an email or two a day, they are earning from you and all their other “workers” by doing less ethical things like sell your personal information and email address to other companies. Some of these sites also have spyware which will install itself into your computer and gather vital information like bank account numbers, passwords and any other useful and confidential content that you have stored on your hard drive.

Other email programs are set up to lure people in, but they never actually pay. So they are receiving money for all the hits they send to their clients, but not paying out to their workers. It is a nasty way to do business, but these sites tend to draw so many people that they will never actually pay, that they just keep going! By promising to pay $1 per referral (or more), they ensure that people continue to reel in fresh meat so they will never lack for workers.

However, it is possible to find decent email reading websites that will not do you damage or steal your personal information and that will truly pay you when they say they will. The best way to find these is to ask people. Avoid anyone who gives you a referral URL since their opinion will be biased. You should also ask to see proof of payment. This just means that the person commenting will send you a screen shot of his or her Paypal account with the amount credited and the name of the business paying, or a photo of a check if that is how the email program pays.

A pay to read email program that is worth checking out is one that pays and has a clear privacy policy which states your information will not be used by anyone except them, and for job-related purposes only. They should also be able to provide proof of payment for their workers.

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Want to be notified instantly when someone logs into your server as root? No problem, check out this nice tutorial on email notification for root logins. Keeping track of who logs into your server and when is very important, especially when you’re dealing with the super user account. We recommend that you use an email address not hosted on the server your sending the alert from.

So lets get started!

1. Login to your server and su to root, I know the irony!

2. cd /root

3. pico .bashrc

4. Scroll to the end of the file then add the following:
echo ‘ALERT – Root Shell Access (YourserverName) on:’ `date` `who` | mail -s “Alert: Root Access from `who | cut -d”(” -f2 | cut -d”)” -f1`” you@yourdomain.com

Replace YourServerName with the handle for your actual server
Replace you@yourdomain.com with your actual email address

5. Crtl + X then Y

Now logout of SSH, close the connection and log back in! You should receive an email address of the root login alert a few minutes afterwards.

Note: This is a great tool for servers that have multiple admins or if you give someone SSH access for whatever reason, although you should give out the root password to as few people as humanly possible and be sure to change it often.

This will not magically alert you when a hacker runs the latest kernel exploit on your server and logs into SSH because they will create their own SSH/telnet connection. You should keep your system up to date, install a firewall and follow the latest security releases.

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1) Start Internet Information Services Manager or open the Internet Information Services (IIS) snap-in.

2) Expand Server_name, where Server_name is the name of the server, right-click Default SMTP Virtual Server, and then click Properties.

3) Click the Access tab, and then under Access control, click Authentication.

4) Click to select either or both the Basic authentication and the Integrated Windows authentication check boxes, click to clear the Anonymous access check box (if it is selected), and then click OK.

By doing so, authentication is required before access is granted to the SMTP virtual server. In this case, if the user or computer does not successfully authenticate, the user or computer cannot send mail to the server.

NOTE: If you click to select the Anonymous access check box and do not click to select the Basic authentication and the Integrated Windows authentication check boxes, all users and computers are able to access the SMTP virtual server.

This disables authentication.

5) Under Relay restrictions, click Relay.

6) Note the options that are available in the Relay Restrictions dialog box. By default, the Only the list below option is selected and this list is empty. Additionally, the Allow all computers which successfully authenticate to relay, regardless of the list above option is selected. With this feature, users and computers that can authenticate with the server can relay through the server. All computers are blocked except those that meet the authentication requirements that you configured earlier in the Authentication dialog box of the Access tab.

Note that if you allow only anonymous access, the server does not authenticate users or computers.

7) Click Add, and then do one of the following to add a single computer, group of computers, or a domain:

Click Single computer.

Type the IP address of the computer that you want in the IP Address box, and then click OK.

Click Group of computers.

Type the subnet address and the Subnet mask of the group into the corresponding boxes, and then click OK.

Click Domain.

Type the domain name that you want in the Name box, and then click OK.

If you do not want to add a computer, group or computers, or a domain, click Cancel.

8) Click OK, and then click OK.

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