MPP Podcast - New Developments But Still the Same Great Solution
Below is a Message Partners‘ podcast covering our newest developments, which includes improvements in usability, and why MPP continues to be the email security solution of choice for large-scale email providers. You can listen to the podcast or simply read the transcript below.
Tell me about some of the recent developments with MPP.
We’ve had some really exciting customer wins. We’re really focusing now on improving the usability of MPP, particularly in two areas. In the archival compliance area and in the management of the solution. We are focusing a lot on adding new capabilities to our archival solution for retrieval, for compliance grade searching, and for export because there’s a growing demand for Linux based archival solutions. And we spent a fair amount of resources reorganizing our GUI and building a whole new web platform for managing both the front end and back end systems.
Are any of these new developments focused on spam accuracy, or are they solely focused on usability?
We think that our detection rates are really the best in the industry. We’re really partnering with some of the best spam technology providers that exist, and there’s really nobody that’s providing any better detection rates then we are right now.
But in the end technology is only a piece of the puzzle; you also have to have usability. Really it comes down to how easy you can install the software, how easy it is for administrators and end-users to operate the software. We feel technologically we’re there already, and that’s really our focus right now, making the software more usable for end-users and administrators.
I’m sure most companies are aware of the vast number of email security solutions available out there right now. What makes MPP unique and why should someone invest in your email security solution?
Well, whenever you’re in a crowded market, differentiation comes from specialization. I mean, of course our spam detection is I think second to none, and anyone that tests that will see that we really have the best spam detection that is available.
But we focus our efforts on a few market niches. MPP is really good for service providers because we support the platforms that they use and we really specialize in multi-domain configurations. MPP is great for people that want to leverage open source because we make open source much easier to use in email security environments. We also have some other small niches in Mac OSX, we’re really the best enterprise grade Mac OSX solution. Those really are our primary strengths.
Technorati Tags: Mac OSX, service providers, email security, open source email security, spam detection, archival, compliance, archival compliance, gui, web platform, detection rates
MPP’s Compliance-Grade Archival
What follows is a Message Partners‘ podcast covering our improved archival feature, which gives companies streamlined, easy-to-use yet compliance-grade archival. To learn more about this feature listen to the podcast or simply read the transcript below.
Tell me about MPP’s Archival feature.
MPP has a very streamlined archival solution that can be applied to any of the supported email servers that we have like Postfix, Sendmail, Qmail, Exim, CommuniGate Pro, SurgeMail, or the Sun Java Systems Message Server. We can archive email to a few different formats. Either MIME files, or a MySQL database or to a standard Maildir format. Our database structure uses standard MySQL, which gives the end user access to lots of tools to scale and manage the database.
MPP has lots of macros so you can build very scalable directory infrastructures if you want to use file-based archival applications for compliance, or for just general cataloging of email. This is a big application that we’re seeing a lot of use for now, where lots of different business or school systems have very generic requirements for archival and need a very streamlined solution to perform that and MPP really fits that bill.
Most people know that once you have archival, email retrieval is also very important. Tell me about MPP’s retrieval capabilities.
MPP has a full retrieval system that is optimized for our MySQL quarantine, which we call qReview. qReview gives you access to full text searches, you can search by user, by date range, and once you have the results you can export the results to a standard MBox format which is ratable by any email client. Or you can save the email as files. But it’s a very streamlined web-based system that is very easy to use.
Compliance is clearly a major issue for email. Is MPP Archival compliance-grade and does it meet the requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley.
MPP meets the requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley and other international standards for small to medium sized organizations. The two main requirements you need to satisfy are to not delete email, to not allow users to delete email from the archive, and some organizations need to show that a certain percentage of email is actually reviewed. MPP can do both of those tasks very easily.
We can also easily search and retrieve email and export it in case of an investigation. MPP can also, by the way, archive Microsoft Exchange email, and is very useful for those environments. So, in conclusion, MPP is compliant for small to medium sized organizations for Sarbanes-Oxley and other critical international regulations.
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Technorati Tags: Archival, Compliance Grade Archival, MySQL, Microsoft Exchange Archival, SMB Archival, streamlined archival, Sarbanes-Oxley, Email standards, email laws, web-based archival, email macros, ISP, protect email, archive email
MPP 3.4 Custom Rejection Feature as API Interface – Simple but Powerful
What follows is a Message Partners‘ podcast covering our custom rejection feature introduced with MPP 3.4., which gives companies an easy-to-use yet powerful API interface. To learn more about this feature listen to the podcast or simply read the transcript below.
Tell me about MPP’s custom rejection feature.
With MPP 3.4 we’ve released a new feature called custom rejection notice. As the name implies, it allows the administrator to build template driven rejection messages that are sent in response to standard conditions like spam infection or virus infections or even clean messages. This was in response to requests from service providers to be able to give more specific information when they reject an email.
It turns out, though, we can also use the same feature as an API Interface to MPP.
Can you detail further how the custom rejection feature can be used as an API.
If you set all of the actions, including “on clean,” “on infection,” “on spam messages,” “on content violations,” every action to reject, then any script can send MPP a message via LMTP or SMTP and MPP will scan the message and then return the template response that you created from your rejection templates. Then the script will parse the response and do whatever it is instructed to do with the message.
The API interface is very simple to implement but very powerful. This gives any script access to all of the MPP scanning modules, as well as the MPP policy engine, which can make differentiated scanning decisions based on domain or email address, etc.
Can you give me an example how a customer would use something like this?
You can now use MPP within Procmail scripts, so say you have on local delivery a Procmail script that says ‘scan all messages,’ this gives you access to all our scanning modules such as Cloudmark or Commtouch. So say you have Procmail script send us the messages, we scan it, send the result back to Promail, then Procmail takes the appropriate action.
This would save a lot of time for the customer because if they want to use Cloudmark in a Procmail script they would have to license the Cloudmark engine, do the development work, and that can very time consuming from a business perspective and a technical perspective.
So we’ve greatly simplified the ability to use the MPP scanning engines and scripts by giving them a very streamlined API to use.
API, Cloudmark, Procmail, API Interface, Commtouch, LMTP, SMTP, custom rejection notice, scanning modules, template response, stop spam, protect email
Technorati Tags: API, Cloudmark, Procmail, API Interface, Commtouch, LMTP, SMTP, custom rejection notice, scanning modules, template response, stop spam, protect email
MPP 3.4 - Postfix Pre and Post-Queue Improvements
What follows is Message Partners‘ podcast focusing on the Postfix improvements with the release of MPP 3.4. You can either listen to or download the podcast or simply read the entire transcript below.
First tell me about MPP’s role with Postfix?
MPP is the only solution that I know of that is commercial or open source that has an integrated policy server and a post-queue content filter. So we’re the only integrated pre post-queue filter that I am aware of for Postfix.
MPP is innovative in our filtering capabilities for Postfix because not only do we support open source engines like SpamAssassin and ClamAV but we have far better alternatives in the spam and virus filtering engines area by also supporting Cloudmark, Commtouch and many other commercial virus scanners for Postfix. So it’s a very comprehensive solution.
So the combination of pre and post-queue capabilities makes MPP the premier filtering solution for Postfix in my opinion.
Can you expand on the policy server?
Postfix has a policy protocol where before messages are actually queued they can send all kinds of content information about the message to a server that will decide whether to accept or reject the message. MPP has made a policy server that can respond to these queries and make intelligent decisions whether to accept or reject messages.
There are many policy servers that are free that are open source but MPP really goes beyond by integrating our policy server with our post-queue content capabilities and with our internal policy engine. So that means we can very easily enable things like grey-listing on a per-domain basis, we can do spam traps on a per-domain basis, we can do thresholds on a per-domain basis, all types of things on a per-domain or per-group basis that would be very complicated configurations in postfix without MPP.
Why should someone go with MPP and Postfix instead of just going with an open source solution?
Well, MPP is innovative in our filtering capabilities for Postfix because not only do we support open source engines like SpamAssassin and ClamAV but we have far better alternatives in the spam and virus filtering engines by also supporting Cloudmark, Commtouch, and Mailshell and many other commercial virus scanners for Postfix.
The integration of pre and post-queue capabilities and the ability to have separate SMTP policies on a per-domain or per-group basis, something that’s very simple to do with MPP, but very complicated to do with Postfix, unless you’re a really really in-depth Postfix administrator and you’re willing to spend a lot of time writing scripts and learning postfix, we offer a much more simplified solution that is very scalable and has a very good interface that really saves a lot of time.
Unfortunately many administrators are just overburdened and managing postfix or email or routers or any one piece of technology is just a small piece of what they do in a day and anything that can save them time and make their jobs easier is a big benefit for them and MPP delivers on that.
MPP has a new release, 3.4, can you tell me how Postfix fits into that release?
We have enhanced our policy server greatly in MPP 3.4. Primarily in the area of scalability by adding a dynamic threading model so that we can increase threads as we need them for our policy server. Before, we have to statically define how many threads the policy server could use similar to postfix, postfix you have to define this statically. However, we found that email is very bursty, and we need to dynamically allocate threads when there’s a spam attack or a big load of messages come in.
So we have created a threading model that will dynamically allocate threads and destroy them when they’re not in use. This allows you to optimize the memory utilization of your server and respond to attacks very elegantly.
Another area that we’ve increased in 3.4 for the policy server is to add white lists, specifically for certain features. For instance, we can white list greylisting, or spam traps, or our automatic blacklist thresholds on a per-user or per-domain basis. So the key areas are dynamic threading for scalability, increase white listing capabilities to fine-tune the environment.
Technorati Tags: postfix, pre-queue filtering, post-queue filtering, threading, scalability, stop spam, end spam, protect email, white listing, SQL, SMTP, black listing, queue, dynamic threading, per-domain, per-group, integrated policy server
MPP 3.4 – Archival and Quarantine Improvements
What follows is Message Partners‘ podcast focusing on the dramatic improvements in archival and quarantine with the release of MPP 3.4. You can either listen to or download the podcast or simply peruse the entire transcript below.
Tell me about Archival and Quarantine for MPP 3.4.
We have added increased scalability features for quarantine and archival by creating a hierarchal system for transporting messages destined for archival or quarantine message store. And also by redesigning our database scheme to scale to much larger organizations.
How will this benefit companies?
Let’s break it down by feature. We’re introduced queuing at three different levels now.
First, whenever a message has to be written to quarantine and archival it used to go directly from MPP to the database but that created problems because if the database was unavailable it was possible that MPP could not process messages and mail-flow could be affected.
So the first thing we did was create an internal disc queue so if the database is not available for some reason MPP writes to disc queue first and then another process writes to the database. So now we can consistently process traffic even during a database failure or, if you have a large message that takes a long time to write to the database we do not interrupt mail-flow.
That’s great for self-contained systems where the mail server and database are on the same server. This queuing will take care of lots of the interruption problems that have occurred in the past.
For our larger installations where there are multiple MPP front ends talking to a single quarantine or archival database we’ve introduced a second level of queuing and something we think is pretty innovative. What we do now is use ESMTP to transport messages from remote MPP instance that just services quarantine. What this allows us to do is transport messages in a standard protocol, SMTP, which has some built in queuing and resiliency, and we can still carry all the attributes of scanning state or wire messages in quarantine or archives in ESMTP headers, so it’s a very elegant and simple way to deal with queuing messages thru a remote archive or quarantine server.
So we have two stages of queuing: first MPP goes to the disc-queue. Then, if we’re going to a remote system, we’re using a process to go from ESMTP to a a centralized MPP that just handles quarantine. Then that MPP instance that just does quarantine or archival has another disc-queue so that if the database connection is lost from that server, mail is still held in the queue and processed when it can be, when the database is available again.
So that’s three different levels of queuing. It’s a lot of resiliency and increases scalability.
Can you tell me more about Archival?
All those changes relate to archival. One of the things we’ve done that enhances both archival and quarantine is introduced a redesigned database scheme. Our old database scheme is fairly scaleable and works for millions of messages but we were relying on some SQL tactics like ‘joins’ which were very very memory intensive. We’ve simplified our database scheme now and we’ve added some fields to make certain repetitive queries like when a domain administrator logs in, for instance, or searching all messages by specific date ranges. We’ve optimized our indexes and redesigned our databases so we do not need ‘joins’ to do these things and that makes the database scale much better, reduces the number of tables, and reduces the complexity of the SQL functionality.
Technorati Tags: quarantine, open source, email security, service providers, scalability, stop spam, end spam, protect email, archival, SQL, ESMTP, email database, queue, disc queue
MPP 3.4 — Functionality and Scalability
Please listen to the podcast below, or simply read the transcript. The podcast discusses MPP’s newest release, MPP 3.4, which improves on functionality and scalability, and which makes MPP even better for protecting the email of large email providers.
Please describe the newest Message Partners release, MPP 3.4.
This is a release we’ve been working on many months. It’s something we’ve taken a lot of customer feedback on and looked at our competition and decided we needed to focus on functionality and scalability. After a lot of work I’m proud to say that this release has succeeded in really increasing the value that MPP provides and enhanced our scalability and function considerably.
Can you expand on that?
So if you look at scalability. Scalability is not just about how many messages per second. It’s really more of a global view of the entire architecture. Not only is it about how many messages can we process in a second but, also, how does our quarantine structure scale, how does our archival system scale, how do our data base structures scale, how does our threading model scale, how do we respond to bursts of traffic because email is a very bursty type of traffic. We have addressed all of these areas in this release.
In terms of embedded functionality. On a very basic level, we function as an integration tool. But an integration tool doesn’t really have enough value for a lot of people to choose us over other products. We need to continually add more embedded functionality into MPP so it really has value as a stand alone product. To that end we have significantly increased functionality in terms of how we can control multiple engines, how we can use comparative spam scoring and our own spam scoring algorithm so we can evaluate many tests. We have added considerable enhancements to our white and black listing methodologies and we’ve done a lot with how we archived messages so we’ve increased the archival capabilities considerably.
How do customers directly benefit from this new release?
Our current customers benefit by seeing increased value in the investment that they’ve already made with us because we have lots of new features and ways to deal with email problems. Our new customers look at MPP and see a much more robust platform and something that can meet very complicated needs or something that can meet very streamlined needs with great efficiencies.
Technorati Tags: MPP, Message Partners, Antispam, open source, spamassassin, email security, service providers, scalability, stop spam, end spam
MPP Enters the Podcast Generation
Multimedia has finally come to life here at Message Partners, thanks to the dynamite team of Pete and Prakash. So with no further adieu I introduce you to the inaugural podcast of the blog where I am interviewed by Peter Schooff. In this gripping and insightful interview, I postulate on MPP’s position in the email security market, the future of MPP, and explain why MPP is different than all of the other email filtering products around.
Technorati Tags: MPP, Message Partners, Antispam, open source, spamassassin, email security