Replacing Maia Mailguard with MPP
MPP is an ideal upgrade/replacement from Maia Mailguard. It will operate on the same Postfix front-ends you currently use with Maia and provides major improvements in GUI, spam quarantine management, spam detection, versatility and performance. Maia customers that we speak with are really excited about MPP because it provides so much functionality and saves so much time. To ease the transition from Maia MPP can read alias files from any MySQL database and soon MPP Core will read white and black list and recipient lists from the existing MySQL database.
Small MPP Manager Features
Just added the ability to define separate spam and archive administrators to MPP along with the ability to pre-set the default spam actions in user preferences.
New Cloudmark Cartridge
We have released Cloudmark 3049.1.3 for MPP. Run your Cloudmark update script to get the latest.
MPP 4.4.4 Released
MPP v4.4.4 is released and it contains an important fix for situations where message tracking is enabled along with archiving of MS Exchange 2007 journaled email. Check our FTP servers for platform specific binaries.
MPP Manager Release
We have released a version of MPP Manager that merged a lot of work for enhancements in policy selection, content filtering and custom spam scoring. This GUI supports:
Ability to assign email policy based on any content in the email header, body or attachment
New content filtering engine is implemented with per-expression actions
Enhancements to MPP custom spam scoring for negative scores and content based spam scoring.
ftp://ftp.messagepartners.com/pub/mppmanager/beta/mppmanager-1.4.7.tar.gz
Fix for Non-English Character Searches
We have delivered an important fix for searching for non-English characters in MPP Email archives. Please updated to the latest MPP Manager if this is a requirement in your environment.
Custom Spam Scoring Enhancements
One of MPP’s most interesting features is custom spam scoring. Custom spam scoring supports aggregate scores that are comprised of multiple tests including the output of antispam plug-ins and rbl tests. We have enhanced this feature to now support custom content rules. This allows you to create your own regular expressions and assign a point value to each expression to influence the aggregate score of a message. This is useful for things like content based whitelists, content based blacklists or entire custom spam algorithms.
Enhanced Alias Support for Spam Quarnatine Management
Many service providers have large databases of aliases stored in MySQL. Migrating these large lists to the formats that MPP Manager mandated for spam quarantine review was proving to be a pain and we were losing business from this. In response to this requirement it is now possible for MPP Manager to read alias information from any MySQL database format. Simply tell MPP Manager the format of your alias database and when a user logs in they will see all of the spam for their aliases. This functionality also supports domain aliases and catch-all accounts.
This functionality eases the transition for users of spamassassin or amavisd that require the power of MPP but don’t want to change large databases and applications that use them.
Policy Selection by Content
One of the most interesting and useful new features in MPP is the ability to assign email to a policy based on content in the message header, body or attachments. Previously MPP could could only associate email to a policy based on sender, recipient, IP or direction of an email. This new capability offers amazing flexibility to do things like content based email routing, content based white or black listing, action based on domain or country TLD or action based on any content in a message header, such as spam scores of upstream scanners, etc.
This capability opens up tremendous flexibility for MPP as an email processing engine and opens a lot of doors for MPP.
Fake and Inneffective Malware Protection
Haven’t written for a while but I just installed a new Vista virtual machine on my Mac and I was amazed at how quickly the fake malware Antivirus 2009 or tried to infect Vista. I did a Google search for an unfortunate disease that my good friend has and the first link was a malware site trying to infect my computer with the bogus Antivirus 2009. Since this is a test system with nothing important I decided to see how easily I could infect myself.
Before I started I performed all Vista system updates which included the relatively useless Windows Defender product, updated my Antivirus software and made all recommended settings by Vista. I did my search again and Google happily brought to the infection site. I am running the latest Firefox version. I decided to act like any non-technical user and followed the instructions of the site. The site told me my computer was at risk and that I should download this free scanning tool, which I did. Vista gave me the typical useless warning that the program may be unsafe, but I ignored purposely since it tthe same warning every time I download and execute a file, even software from Microsoft. It’s kind of like the warning stickers on mattresses, car air bags, etc. - they are so pervasive and general that they are just ignored. I put my faith in the malware protection tools I had installed and in the security of Vista. Sad to say I was let down by everything I relied on.I installed the malware with no warnings from my antivirus or antispyware tools and it completely infected my Vista Home Premium computer in minutes.
This simple experiment shows how easily malware spreads, how poorly Microsoft does with security, how Google is complicit in the spread of malare, how ineffective AV software can be and how ineffective antispyware software can be. This experience led me to my conclusion that as in all of life, the only thing that could have saved me from myself was my own common sense. Security software gives us a false sense of security and the bumbling idiots at Microsoft couldn’t secure Windows if they had a billion dollars to spend and thousands of engineers - oh crap, they have both :-(. While malware protection software may protect us from unseen threats that silently attack and control our computers, education is the only way that we will ever stem the spread of the malware that drives criminal enterprises.
As the Father of three girls, two who are in middle school and one in primary school in the New York, I can attest that none of them learn a thing about computer security in school. They all have to agree to not look at porn, racist or violent material with school computers, but these lengthy leglistic agreements are mostly for the protection of the school against law suits but aren’t designed to protect the children. Certainly there is no concerted effort to educate my children about the threats of the Internet, malicious click farms and ways to distinguish between fraudulent and legit web sites. Until a serious education programs is put into place the spread of malware will continue and computers around the globe will remain unsafe. Of course we could all use Macs and that would end a lot of problems as well, but hey, that’s another issue.
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