MPP and Beyond

It sure feels like we are on a roll with our improvements for Mac OS X system administrators, so why should we stop? After listening to complaint after complaint about the difficulty of installing MPP we finally took the advice of Frank Zappa, though applied to software - ’shut up and play yer guitar’. Instead of explaining why our customers were just not getting it we shut up and listened and have created something that has exceeded our expectations.

Phase 1 was to redesign our admin GUI to make things more apparent, remove cryptic techno speak and drop the assumption that everyone has enough time to figure our product out. This is an ongoing battle, but we have conquered the initial campaign and now we are in clean-up mode.

Phase 2 was to redo our installers so that it was no longer necessary to have a compiler installed or to install any perl modules. This was a monster task believe it or not, but this is conquered thanks to Ovidiu, our main technical guru. This was great, but it still required an admin to use the terminal to run our configure scripts.

Phase 3 which we have now delivered has expanded on phase 2 by removing the need to run our configure script from the command line. Since our OS X customers are either using Postfix or CommuniGate we detect which email server is in use and make all of the appropriate configurations automatically. The installer is one click and it installs MPP, MPP Manager and all dependencies, configures our email server to use MPP and launches Safari at the end with MPP Manager opened up. Pretty slick if you ask me. You still need to disable the Apple junk mail filtering from the admin control panel, but this may change in the future as well.

Phase 4 has some surprises and I am hoping to announce them soon.

Technorati Tags: Mac OS X, MPP, Email Security, Spam Filtering, Mac Email Security

MPP has long been a great antispam solution for Mac OS X email servers and gateways, but it has also been quite difficult to install for the busy admin. We have racked our brain on this for years and we have finally come up with a solution that goes a long way to fixing our installation issues. Further improvements are on the way, but I am really psyched about how far we have come.

Before I present the solution I want to give a little background to the problem. There are 2 components to MPP, MPP Core and MPP Manager. MPP Core has been easy to install for many years, it is just a matter of running the DMG installer for MPP and then a configure script. The configure script sets up the email server to work with MPP and sets basic settings in MPP’s configuration. The problems with getting MPP installed have mostly been related to MPP Manager or in previous iterations of our GUI (Webmin module, qReview).

The GUI controls for MPP have depenencies that we required users to install. The dependencies were a include Perl modules and 2 system libraries - expat, an XML browser, and GD, a graphing tool. Perl modules can generally be installed with CPAN, a menu driven command line utility and the libraries required source downloads a simple compiles. If your eyes are glossing over and you are ready to go back to check your favorite web site again then you are not alone. These tasks are foreign to many admins and frankly, Apple hasn’t made it any simpler. Typically a few Perl modules will fail compilation and the standard GD library won’t compile on OS X. Beyond that, unless you add a compiler on your server from XCODE, you will not be able to compile anything on OS X.

Fortunately for Apple users, there is a wonderful organization, Macports, that makes installing standard open source software easier for Mac OS X admins, but even this is too complicated for many to explore. Macports allows admins to install libraries and perl modules that have been tailored for Mac OS X. It is similar to yum or up2date on Linux and is an incredible resource. Any Mac OS X administrator that is not familiar with Macports should take a minute to explore it. I know that Apple wants to hide the terminal from you but you can really unlock the power of OS X on the terminal.

So finally, after years, we have gotten the message from our customers or potential customers and created a DMG installer for MPP Manager that installs all necessary libraries and perl modules pre-built. No more compiler, no more Macports, no more CPAN, no more nothing, just double click and install. When the installer is done Safari is automatically opened to the MPP admin link. It is the simplest installation of MPP GUI tools ever and I hope you will have the chance to check it out soon.

If you want to give it a try, please give it a try:

Mac OS X PPC
ftp://ftp.raeinternet.com/pub/mpp3/beta/mppmanager/mppmanager-1.1.1-osx.ppc.dmg

Mac OS X Intel
ftp://ftp.raeinternet.com/pub/mpp3/beta/mppmanager/mppmanager-1.1.1-osx.i386.dmg

With the release of MPP Manager 1.1.0 we have made MPP easier to use than ever. We have attempted to look at features in terms of functionality and usefulness and presented them in this manner. We have moved less frequently changed options to advanced sections, we have replaced obtuse configuration options with useful, plain descriptions and we have tried to simplify presentation as much as possible. We have removed the abundance of options that confuse and created more interpretive commands that set options for you so you don’t have the burden of understanding each and every MPP micro feature. I hope that you will check this out and give us your feedback. If you have tried MPP in the past and found it to be a lot to comprehend I hope that you will give us a second look. Having a powerful and versatile product is a blessing and a curse for the end-user, but I think we are more of the former now.

The number one complaint we hear about MPP is that it needs to be easier to install and manage. To this end we are pleased to release a redux of our VMWare virtual appliance.

It has never been easier to install MPP than now. With the MPP Virtual Appliance you can have a complete antispam and email archival gateway running in less than 10 minutes after download. You can install on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X and the user needs no knowledge of Linux to configure the system in a typical application.

We are continuing our efforts to improve the MPP user experience and I thank you all for your candid feedback.

Download from here:
http://www.messagepartners.com/wp-content/downloads/

Readme:
ftp://ftp.messagepartners.com/pub/appliance/README.txt

Technorati Tags: email security, antispam, spam, mpp, message partners

We’ve been getting a few questions about MPP Community edition so I thought I would give you a brief update on the product. First of all, it is alive here and you can download here. It was unintentionally orphaned during the move of the web site to our new platform.

More importantly though, I want to explain what MPP Community is. MPP Community (aka MPP Free Edition) was released to build the MPP user base and name recognition. It represented the first version of our product but was scaled down to only support free content scanners - clamav and spamassassin. It is easier to use than some of the open source apps that do something similar, like amavisd, but it is more streamlined in functionality.

In reality, MPP Community has turned out to be a mixed blessing. We do have many people using it, but few are interested in becoming paying customers. Furthermore, MPP Community is soooooo much less interesting and powerful than MPP that people get the wrong idea about MPP itself. There is virtually no resemblance between MPP Community and our commercial product from the perspective of the GUI, functionality and more.

So for now we will keep MPP Community going with no changes and we will see what the future holds.

Thank you for your continued support.

I am pleased to announce the first MPP screencast. This screencast shows the steps for initial configuration of MPP Manager and describes some of the features of MPP GUI.

Get It Here

You must be registered on the support site to get this content.

Today we are pleased to announce MPP Manager 1.0.3. Besides fixing a number of cosmetic issues the following bugs were fixed:

• configuration for mppserver, Qreview and MPP GUI moved to /etc/mppserver
• fixed SSL and added support for SSL certificate installation within the mppserver framework
• added SMTP tab in MPP GUI and revamped how it works
• reorganized menu tree in MPP GUI
• added support for spam_add_spamassassin_hits option in MPP GUI
• fixed log location parsing at install time for correct use in mpp_parser.pl
• now using correct Escape.pm on RH4/CentOS4
• improved translation capability for tool tips and corner cases.

Today we are pleased to announce the release of MPP Manager. MPP Manager is an integrate package with MPP Server, our web platform, MPP GUI, our GUI manager and qReview the manager of spam quarantines and email archives. While this culminates nearly a year of development it is also the first step towards making MPP easier to use, install and manage. It represents a big commitment to GUI controls and the first fruits of this focus. Look for many more refinements and enhancements in our GUI controls this year!

Thanks to all of you who helped so much in this effort!

Technorati Tags: MPP, email security, antispam, Message Partners, email archival

As we overhaul our web content we are also making some minor product name changes. It will take a while to have the changes permeate all of our literature but you will start to see the names on our more dynamic content.

MPP Core = MPP Enhanced Editoin
MPP Manager = qReview/MPP GUI
MPP Plug-In’s remain unchanged
MPP Community Edition = MPP Free Edition

2008 is the year of communications for Message Partners. The fact is that we have an ass-kicking product that is only getting better but we have done a crap job of telling the world about it. This year we will turn that around though.

2008 will be the year that MP goes Web 2.0. We are already migrating our site to a new, modern platform and coming up with new, interesting ways to convey our messages. We are ripping apart outdated and redundant information in our site and tech docs and consolidating them into our knowledgebase and a streamlined web site. These are only baby steps though, but they will lead us to our goal of clear, concise and compelling communications.

Any feedback you have is greatly appreciated.