MPP Australia Email Security Blog

We have great news for Mac OS X mail servers - MessagePartners US has now released a first to market product using the Commtouch Enterprise Anti Spam engine.
And its as easy as running 1 installation - the program does all the compiling and setup work for you - you just have to tell it to start! We cant make it any easier.
Available for Intel based Mac, Tiger or Leopard versions. Now you can really get the lot for your Mac Server - industry leading antispam protection, content filtering, email archival, attachment stripping, end-user quarantine review and industry leading spam protection. Why not download a trial today via our website and test it for yourself!!
Our press release is available HERE

Great article from Ovidiu on how to install the MPP config GUI and qReview / Archive interface - have a read @:

http://messagepartners.com/ovidiu/blog/?p=15

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.
MPP Virtual Appliance is a semi-configured Linux gateway solution using Postfix and MPP (between real mail server and firewall/NAT host/router). All you need is the VMWare Player and you can start !! OS: Windows / Linux, OS: MacOS X / Intel OS: MacOS X / Intel
The VMware engine comes configured with-
* OS: Debian Linux 4.0 (Etch)
* MTA: Postfix version 2.3.8
* MPP version 3.6.1 trial
* DB server: MySQL 5.0.34
* MPP Manager 1.0.5 (Qreview 3.2.2 + MPP GUI 3.6.1)
setup ready to start! Further into available at ftp://ftp.messagepartners.com/pub/appliance/README.txt
Get your free trial today from our website - http://mpp.ezylink.net.au/trial.php

MPP can archive email into a variety of formats to satisfy a range of applications ranging from compliance with regulatory statutes to general historic archival. The MPP archive system is unique in that it is standard and open and is especially well suited to Linux and other *nix operating environments.
MPPserver is our archive search and retrieval application, included when you buy MPP. Since the archived emails are in standard format you are also able to integrate other archive analysis software of use the powerful builtin mppserver engine (with the optional sphinx text search upgrade also available for fast email scanning/searching).
MPP archives in a variety of formats - MySQL, MIME encoded files, maildir or hybrid(metadata) file locations.

The 2 separate engines that managed spam reviewing (qReview) and MPP configuration (webmin) have now been replaced by 1 single install and program - MPPmanager. It installs as easily as MPP, and loads up the qReview and MPP management GUI program at the same time. It is a simplified install and upgrade, and gives much better access and control than the previous programs for both end user spam/archive review, and full admin control of the MPP configuration files (as well as statistics, logs and advanced searching ability).
Download mppserver today from the MPP FTP site - HERE

One feature of MPP is the ability it has to strip the MIME part from an email and store it on a server while replacing the MIME part with a link ot the file location.
For example you can configure all .ppt files (powerpoint) over 10MB are stripped from emails and saved onto an ftp/http server and gets replaced with a link in the email. This feature can greatly reduce the size requirements for mailboxes since just the text ends up in the users mailbox store.
Also it can reduce the load on the mailserver, where the same attachment is sent to more than 1 user on the system. The single file is stored on the server, and user A,B,C and D simply get a link to the file to download. If the attachment was 10MB, thats 30MB of space that is saved / not required (4 attachments would be 4×10MB = 40MB) !!

Greylisting is a very effective, low-resource tool to stop spam and virus’. It works by sending an SMTP temporary failure message to any new sender on your network. Most spam drones and virus engines do not retry after temporary failure messages and simply go away, whilst legit mailservers will retry again after a period. Just be aware that new senders emails wont come through instantly - but once retried from the sending mail server and found OK their address is recorded and allowed as normal from then on.

Greylisting works with MPP and Postfix systems, and is integrated on a per group or system wide basis - and is another way that the MPP engine enables mail admins to reduce end user spam email even more.

We have been running the MPPD for a few years now to i thought it would be intersting to see the stats that the server is producing for our email filtering.

Date

Total

Clean

Virus

Spam

Error

WBL matched

RBL matched

11-19

24527

Clean 1996 (8.14%)

Virus 49 (0.20%)

Spam 2184 (8.90%)

0.00 (%)

0 (0.00%)

RBL 20298 (82.76%)

We sampled 1 days email (20 hrs) to see how it was performing - and the figures are amazing. Over 24000 emails hit our server, of which only 8% were legit! so over 22000 emails were junk - with the MPP filter blocking RBL (black list), Commtouch traced spam and ClamAV ID’d virus’ at the front door of our sendmail box. Some were rejected, some sent to SQL quarantine, and some passed through with no noticeable affect on the server boxes performance.Its incredible to think what end users would be getting in their mailbox each day if MPP wasnt there protecting the system.

MessagePartners MPP eMail server security is the product we use for our mail server. It protects our internet customer base from spam and virus’ before they even get to their mailboxes - keeping them free for the good stuff to make it through.

We initially ran MPP with SpamAssasin, a free anti spam engine that worked well, but would only get about 60-70% of the spam coming in (which was a major improvement over 0% which is what it was!).

We then looked at upgrading to a commercial engine - and went with Mailshell. Another major upgrade, which got us up to about 85% stoppage, but with a few emails starting to get false positives. Its always going to happen thanks to the many and varied ways spammers try to get their junk out!

Just recently we went to one of the premium anti spam engines (Cloudmark being the other one) called Commtouch. And i have to say the spam recognition is now around 96-98%, with virtually NO false positives! Our customers are getting the advantage of only real mail coming in, and our mail server is not overloaded with junk. It only costs a few dollars more per year for each mailbox to have the premium engine, but it was worth every cent. It is becoming a strange expenrience to check the mail each day and find its all real - something I havent seen in a real long time!