MPP and Beyond

The other day a customer asked me how to use MPP as a mail router. In the process of researching this I was alerted to a very cool capability of MPP by our lead developer that I would like to share.

Typically we mail forwarding by creating a policy-group and setting action = forward. After MPP checks the email according to the policy configuration the email is forwarded based on the forward_address configuration (which is macro driven). An alternative apporach is to forward email using our content filtering module. Using this method email can be forwarded based in content in the header, body or attachment name. This is great for surveillance, CRM applications or any app that requires content based mail routing.

So…the new bit that I learned from our lead developer is our ability to forward email SMTP servers on different ports. So with this we can forward to other content filters or SMTP servers based on policy-match, message content, sender/receiver, IP address, spam score, etc. This makes MPP ideal as a true content-based smtp router. So for example, you can have all spam redirected to another content filter for rechecking or quarantine, or have all email from a sender/receiver pair sent to a specific email server. On the surface it may sound alot like Postfix transport maps, but it goes a lot deeper since we can make content based routing decisions. Furthermore, since MPP has an integrated pre-queue policy-server and post-queue content filter for Postfix we can make intelligent per-recipient routing decisions.

If you have any questions about this please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Technorati Tags: smtp routing, smtp, postfix, mpp, message partners