4.50.8: some comments

[Jeff A. Earickson]

Julian,
    I rolled out 4.50.8 this morning, cool, working great so far.
Some comments about what I found with it:

* Tracking a batch:  Now that we have a cool timing feature for
batches of messages, I wonder if batches could be uniquely 
identified by something like a "bid" (batch id number, like pid),
eg:

   New Batch 12345: Found 4 messages waiting
   New Batch 12345: Scanning 1 messages, 9020 bytes
   Batch 12345 processed in 4.11 seconds

Where "12345" is the bid number.  Just a suggestion...

* lint feature:  When I ran this, it said:

    ./MailScanner --lint
    Read 696 hostnames from the phishing whitelist
    Config: calling custom init function IPBlock
    Could not use Custom Function code MailScanner::CustomConfig::InitIPBlock,
    it could not be "eval"ed. Make sure the module is correct with perl -wc at
    /opt/MailScanner/lib/MailScanner/Config.pm line 798
    Checking SpamAssassin errors (if you use it), this may take some time...
    Using SpamAssassin results cache
    Connected to SpamAssassin cache database
    SpamAssassin reported no errors.

I'm probably one of the few people who use IPBlock.

* perl modules: What's up to date?

The first thing I do with a new install is comment out the perl
modules install portion of install.sh.  I'm paranoid, and I want
to do this by hand.  Then I compare what you have in perl-tar to
what I have installed in perl (I use pmdesc from pmtools, see CPAN),
and also compare to what CPAN has for the modules.  I tend to run
the latest versions from CPAN, and MailScanner upgrades are the
perfect time to check CPAN for new stuff.  Here's a comparison
of yours versus CPAN:

                   Yours  CPAN
    Archive-Zip    1.14   1.16
    Compress-Zlib  1.34   1.41
    File-Spec      0.82   * (see below)
    HTML-Parser    3.45   3.48
    HTML-Tagset    3.03   3.10
    IO-stringy     2.108  2.110
    MIME-Base64    3.05   3.07
    MIME-Tools     5.417  5.419
    MailTools      1.50   1.71
    Net-CIDR       0.10   0.11
    TimeDate       1.1301 1.16 (**)

    *  File-Spec seems to have been superseded by PathTools-3.15
    ** TimeDate-1.16 is nearly two years old and seems to have been
       absorbed into the perl 5.8.7 release, maybe.  I wonder if this
       one is needed anymore?

Maybe time to upgrade a few modules in perl-tar?  It seems like a
bunch of module authors released new versions in late December.

Jeff Earickson
Colby College