Eric
Mercury/32 v4.01 is now available from the following location:
ftp://ftp.usm.maine.edu/pegasus/mercury32/m32-401.exe
Probably the most work in v4.01 was done for the least-visible
results: the MercuryI IMAP server has been dramatically overhauled and
should now work substantially better than in v3.32. Indeed, improved
reliability has been a hallmark of the development of v4.01, and we think it's probably going to prove to be the most reliable overall release we've ever made.
-- David --
What's new in Mercury/32 v4.01?
V4.0, while a long time coming, includes some of the most powerful
improvements we have ever made to Mercury, and creates a significant
roadmap for future versions. In particular, the MercuryB web server
protocol module heralds the arrival of web-based management and
services for Mercury, and the inclusion of SSL support improves security
dramatically.
* MercuryB HTTP server: this new protocol module implements the
HTTP protocol for web-based access using a loadable service module
approach to provide services. MercuryB is not intended as a general-
purpose web server - it is specifically targeted at tasks specific to
Mercury, such as mailing list subscription management (included in this
release), remote administration and web mail (in development).
* SSL/TLS support The MercuryS (SMTP server), MercuryP
(POP3 server) and MercuryI (IMAP4 server) protocol modules now have comprehensive, easy-to-enable support for the SSL secure sockets
protocol.
* Web-based mailing list subscription management Using the new
MercuryB HTTP server, mailing list subscribers can now manage their list subscriptions over the web. Subscribing, unsubscribing and managing subscriptions is now as easy as using a web browser and filling in some simple forms.
* Heavily improved spam filtering The content control engine in
Mercury/32 v4.0 has been heavily enhanced with new tests and a new
default rule set that catches vastly more spam. We are also currently
developing auto-update mechanisms that will allow spam rule sets to be
updated automatically, allowing faster response to new types of spam as
it arises. The content control engine now also has more options for
adding headers to messages and can generate diagnostic headers
indicating which rules contributed to the calculated weight for the
message. Mercury's autoreply engine has also been changed so that any
message getting a positive content control weight will not receive an
autoreply: this prevents the server from sending autoreplies in the
majority of cases.
* Improved HTML and encoding handling in Content Control
Mercury's content control engine has been retrofitted with improvements made in Pegasus Mail v4.12, and now only checks textual components of messages. When doing so, it now correctly applies BASE64 and Quoted- printable decoding before applying its tests, and strips HTML tags from HTML content (leaving only A, IMG and base tags for later testing). Content control now has explicit tests that check for lazy HTML (IMG tags with remote references), IFRAME tags, and excessive numbers of comments. The regular _expression_ engine has also been extended with a number of powerful new tests.
* Attachment filtering Mercury's general-purpose filtering rule
engine has been enhanced with the ability to filter attachments within
messages. Attachment filters can work on the filename or extension of
the attachment, and can delete attachments from messages if required.
The filtering engine now also has an action that can add a header of your
choosing to any message as it is processed.
* VERP support in mailing lists VERP (variable envelope return
processing) allows near-total automation of error processing in mailing
lists. Mercury/32 now includes three modes for handling mailing list
errors, two of which use VERP. For larger lists, VERP can substantially reduce the amount of effort required to keep subscriber lists up-to-date.
* Subscription passwords You can now specify that a password be
required for subscription to a mailing list - this eliminates casual or
unwanted subscriptions to mailing lists and reduces moderator workloads.
* MercuryI IMAP Server improvements The IMAP4 server has
been heavily overhauled and is now much more robust than in previous
versions. Sites using stateless clients (such as webmail packages like
Twig or IMP) should notice performance improvements as well.
* Transaction-level filtering in MercuryS The MercuryS SMTP
server now supports filtering at the transaction level - you can apply
expressions to the SMTP EHLO command and to the data of the
message as it is actually received. This is an incredibly powerful feature,
particularly for dealing with address harvesters and spammers who
attempt to relay via your server.
* Short-term blacklisting MercuryS now supports the idea of short-
term blacklisting, where clients that breach too many compliance
conditions or match specific transaction-level filters can be blocked from connecting to the server for a period of 30 minutes. This is a powerful way of dealing with zombie systems (computers that have been taken over by hackers or spammers) and of protecting against denial-of-service attacks.
* Connection control overhauled The ability of the Mercury server
modules to control which machines can connect to them based on IP
address has been totally overhauled. It is now possible to specify arbitrary address ranges to which restrictions can be applied, and each restriction can have specific attributes enabled or disabled (so, for instance, you could create an "Allow" entry that permitted a system to relay mail through MercuryS but which was not exempt from transaction-level filtering).
* Improved console output The various Mercury server protocol
modules now produce much more detailed information on the console
and in the log files to show why particular actions occurred.
* Progressive backoff in delivery You can now tell Mercury to use
a "progressive backoff" algorithm when calculating retries for mail jobs; this tells Mercury to start with a relatively short retry period, then use gradually longer and longer retry periods the more retries occur. This can dramatically speed the delivery of mail when one-off transient glitches occur, and cuts down queue congestion caused by messages with more significant delivery problems.
------------------ David Harris -+- Pegasus Mail ----------------------
Box 5451, Dunedin, New Zealand | e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Phone: +64 3 453-6880 | Fax: +64 3 453-6612
Sign seen in a Tokyo bar:
"Special cocktails for the ladies with nuts."
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