MPP and Beyond

Introducing ftp://ftp.messagepartners.de, our new European FTP mirror. Thank you to Bitbone, our German distribution partner.

ClamAV has sold to Sourcefire. Another interesting development in the ever changing landscape of the open source myth. The myth being that a few guys in a farmhouse in Eastern Europe or 16 year old kids in their bedroom tirelessly crank out code for the betterment of society.

The clamav team is truly one of the best in open source and I hope they all made a lot of money, but this development sheds even more light on the motivations to develop and support open source by education, institutions, venture capital and large corporations - done right, open source can make money. It can take out a giant, like the Mozilla organization, IBM and others are trying to do to MSFT, it can kill small competitors, it can commoditize profit centers, while it contributes great free software. But the catch is that it needs very deep pockets to finance it, which by in large, it has.

So good news for the ClamAV guys. I wish them the best. All you guys that have buried clamav in your commercial software, it may be a good time to revisit that idea!

Technorati Tags: clamav, sourcefire, open source

MPP is and excellent tool to find outbound spammers as well as abusers of your email servers. If you are an ISP you know how much of a pain in the neck it is when your servers get blacklisted by big email providers like GMAIL or AOL.

Often times you are blocked because your users are sending too much email to the services. The problem is that the email that you are sending could be legitimate or it could be spam, but since you can’t control how your customers forward email to these services putting in a spam scanner is not going to help the problem.

This is where MPP’s thresholds, rate detection and limiting technologies come in handy. With MPP you can define thresholds to watch for. Thresholds have 3 detection components; number of messages, number of spam messages and time period. For this application, the number of spam messages is not relevant since spam is not the problem this scenario - the problem is legitimate email. So you can define policies like this:

60 emails in 30 seconds with 0 spams
or
10 spams out of 10 messages in 30 seconds

Once a threshold is crossed then MPP can take multiple actions; block, warn, quarantine or defer. Defer only works with Postfix, but it works with both our policy server and content-filter so we can defer email within the Postfix queue or we can defer external hosts. If defer doesn’t solve your problems then you can also quarantine traffic, block it or simply warn an administrator.

Like all features, Thresholds can be defined on a per-domain or per-direction basis. In other words, you can restrict the checking to outbound only traffic for select domains. You can also exempt IP’s from threshold checking if need be.

Thresholds are part of the MPP Enhanced core and the new Postfix Toolbox

Technorati Tags: outbound spam, email security, spam, postfix, email rate limiting, antispam, MPP, message partners

The latest MPP GUI module features email reports with MPP stats. We will be greatly expanding this and your feedback is helpful in this regard. The new module also includes some basic per-engine stats that will also be enhanced over time.

We are spending a lot of energy on GUI and reporting enhancements and your continued feedback is encouraged.