MailScanner ANNOUNCE: Version 4.50 released

[Julian Field]

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Morning all,

A major new release this month, with around 40 new features and  
improvements.

The major highlights are:

- - Great speed improvements. Many sites are seeing 40% speed improvement.
- - Auto-detection of installed virus scanners.
- - Zero-configuration required on sendmail systems. You no longer need  
to set configuration options in MailScanner.conf, it will auto-detect  
the presence of SpamAssassin and your virus scanning engines.
- - New UU-decoder to allow filename and filetype traps in UU-encoded  
files inside attachments.
- - Many command-line options added to the "MailScanner" command so you  
can test your configuration, evaluate rulesets and debug your  
installation without have to set the debug options in  
MailScanner.conf. Type "MailScanner --help" for more information.  
"MailScanner --lint" is particularly useful.

Download this major update from www.mailscanner.info

** Please note you will need to run the installation script ./ 
install.sh as several new modules have been added to it to support  
the new features.

The whole Change Log is this:
(as you can see, it has been a busy month :-)

- - Speed increased significantly! Caches SpamAssassin results.
   Note you need to run my install.sh script to get the new modules  
required.
- - If "Virus Scanners = auto" (ie. the installed default value) then it
   searches for and uses every available installed virus scanner.
- - Added SpamAssassin cache analyser (analyse_SpamAssassin_cache) to the
   distributions. 99% written by Steve Freegard of MailWatch fame.
- - Upgraded ClamAV+SA bundle to ClamAV 0.88.
- - Added default headers that Thunderbird 1.5 will use to automatically
   identify spam based on SpamAssassin's spam headers.
- - Added UU-decoder to automatically extract files from attachments  
that were
   stored in uu-encoded form. This behaves similarly to the zip and rar
   decoders. The virus scanners should check inside these files for  
themselves
   anyway, but this assists them when they do not. It also allows for  
filename
   and filetype checking of files stored in uu-encoded attachments.
- - Added configuration option "Find UU-Encoded Files" to set whether  
uu-encoded
   files are decoded or not. These files are very rarely used, and the
   overhead of finding them is fairly large as it involves reading all
   existing attachments looking for the signature of them. So the  
default is
   to not look for them. A ruleset can be used to protect particularly
   vulnerable recipients or senders.
- - You can now start up MailScanner without changing MailScanner.conf  
at all.
   It will auto-detect SpamAssassin and all available virus scanners.
- - Changed default setting to "Use SpamAssassin = yes" and now auto- 
detect
   installation of SpamAssassin, logging installation instructions if
   it is not already installed and working.
- - Added DBI and DBD::SQLite Perl modules. Please use my install.sh  
scripts
   when you upgrade or install this version.
- - Added American spelling of "analyze_SpamAssassin_cache" as well as  
English
   spelling of "analyse_SpamAssassin_cache".
- - DBI installation is forced in RPM distributions.
- - Improved RPM installer to handle DBI module dependencies better. It  
now
   installs cleanly on the systems I have tested it on. These include  
Fedora
   Core 3, Fedora Core 4, SuSE 9.3, SuSE 10, RedHat Enterprise 4.
- - Made log warnings more obvious when DBI/DBD::SQLite/Digest::MD5 are  
not
   all installed properly.
- - Improved comments about "Allow Filenames" and "Allow Filetypes" in
   MailScanner.conf.
- - Improvement to F-Prot output parser to handle new strings.
- - Changed filename/type traps to account for new vulnerability in  
TNEF files.
- - Adapted trend-autoupdate for 2006 onwards.
- - --help implemented so you can see how to use it now.
- - --debug now written. Works just like "Debug = yes" in  
MailScanner.conf.
- - --debug-sa now written. Works just like "Debug SpamAssassin = yes".
- - --check ruleset-checker now written. Takes max 1 from address,  
multiple to
   addresses, client IP address and virus name.
- - Added a new command-line parameter "--lint" to verify the config file.
- - --lint now prints what virus scanners you have chosen to use, and what
- - --lint now checks SpamAssassin configuration too.
   scanners it can find installed.
- - Added hi-res timing so the batch speed timings are now displayed to  
micro-
   second accuracy.
- - Added Time::HiRes to the list of required modules. You must use ./ 
install.sh
   to upgrade to, or install, this version in order to get the new  
module.
   Time taken to process the entire batch is logged, and time taken  
to do
   "Always Looked Up Last" is logged separately if it is being used  
at all.
- - Added check that MailScanner.conf has at least been customised to  
set the
   organisation name, long name and web site.
- - Added "SpamAssassin Cache Timings" configuration option for the few  
people
   who need to adjust these settings. Do *not* change it unless you  
really
   know what you are doing, the default settings will work nicely.
- - Updated important perl modules.
- - Removed duplicate logging of warnings about infected messages.
- - Added detection of no virus scanners being installed, giving the user
   advice about how to install ClamAV using my easy-installation  
package.
- - Improved ClamAV+SA easy-installation package so that it automatically
   enables the updates by commenting out the "Example" lines.
- - Changed default Lock Type for sendmail to "posix" instead of  
"flock" as
   new Linux systems (the most popular platform by far) run sendmail  
8.13 or
   later, which requires this to be "posix".
- - Upgraded Sys::Hostname::Long and HTML::Parser in ClamAV+SA package.
- - Disabled movie format "deny" rules in filetype.rules.conf and have  
enabled
   filetype checking by default.
- - Updated man pages.
- - Updated AVG parser to handle latest version 7.1.
- - Added "Always Looked Up Last After Batch" which is looked up after the
   "Always Looked Up Last" option. The 2nd of those is looked up once  
for
   each message, the "...After Batch" value is looked up once for the
   entire batch. It is only intended for use with a Custom Function, its
   value is ignored.

* Fixes *
- - Improved reliability of Bayes rebuilds a lot.
- - Force installation of DBI as previous versions cause problems.
- - Removed broken patch I was given, which was temporarily in 4.50.
- - Packaging bug in 4.50.9-1 fixed. MailTools version typo.
- - Fixed bug where temporary files were not cleaned up properly.
- - Fixed missing HTML-Parser 3.48 package.


- -- 
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
Buy the MailScanner book at www.MailScanner.info/store
PGP footprint: EE81 D763 3DB0 0BFD E1DC 7222 11F6 5947 1415 B654


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