MPP Adds Sphinx Support for Email Archive Searching
I am really happy to announce that we have our first cut of qReview, our application for reviewing email archives and spam quarantines, that supports Sphinx. Sphinx is an open source tool that provides fast full-text searching of MySQL databases. MPP is an application that can archive email from Postfix, Sendmail, Qmail, CGP, Exim and other email servers.
I am pretty psyched about this because it really advances our functionality in the email archival space. If you are interested to give it a try then check out the how-to guide here or drop me a line.
Happy Searching!
Technorati Tags: mpp, email archival, email security, compliance, postfix, linux, sphinx
Recent Rise in Hanging SMTP Connections
A few customers of MPP have recently reported issues with SMTP connections hanging. I found an interesting advisory, that while specifically targeted to Postfix, there is information relative to all email server admins. The author mangled 3 distinct topics together, but it is a good read:
Postfix Mailservers Under Stress
Anyone that runs and smtp server is vulnerable to the issue of smtp connections that aren’t closed properly. The report of a huge increase in broken smtp connections is relative to anyone.
The bit about policyd is interesting, but as you point out, it is not relevant to most people. Heck, we even think our policy server is much better, especially with the integration with our content filter and cool rate limiting capabilities, which can be tied to spam count and connection count.
Lastly, the description of how to tune Postfix is interesting to all Postfix ops, though there is an interesting fact mingled in that relates number of open smtp connections to how the linux kernel is configured.
To me, the bottom line is that even with more antispam companies than taco bell’s the spam problem is growing at an incredibly rapid pace.
Technorati Tags: postfix, email security, antispam, mpp, spam
MPP Postfix Policy Server Tips
MPP has a powerful policy server for Postfix that is unique in its integration with a post-queue content filter. The integration of pre-queue policy decisions and post-queue processing capabilities distinguish our policy server implementation. The following are a few guidelines for configuring and using our policy server.
1) Beginning in version 3.4 we added a dynamic thread allocation model to the Postfix Policy Server. It is critical to implement this threading model to respond to SMTP bursts, otherwise there may not be enough threads available to process policy queries. Here are the commands that are necessary to enable dynamic threading, they are available n the GUI or can be added manually to the common section of mppd.conf.xml. Add with lt/gt signs, which this blog software leaves out.
policy_threads_min 1
policy_threads_max 120
These commands are not currently in the GUI, but will be added soon.
2) The policy-server can be configured as a standalone element or alongside your mpp instance. You can control the location the policy server in the policy-server socket configuration section of the GUI.
3) The policy-sever works with our thresholds and auto-blacklists - you should use these features to stop repetitive spammers or email flooders.
4) We have a new action of defer for threshold violations which the policy-server supports in order to regulate the flow of inbound email for chatty remote smtp servers.
More to come, but these are some good features to check out for now.