[BlueOnyx:16129] AV-SPAM v6.0.0 available on NewLinQ

[Michael Stauber]

Hi all,

I usually don't mention commercial product updates here, but this time
it's necessary. Both to avoid questions and because people have actually
been waiting for the AV-SPAM so that they can move to 5207R or 5208R.

AV-SPAM v6.0.0:
================

Available for: *ALL* versions of BlueOnyx.

The same PKG contains *both* the old GUI and the new GUI. So if you have
an old 5107R or 5108R that you eventually want to update to 5207R or
5208R, then you can install the AV-SPAM v6.0.0 now and it will continue
to work with the new GUI later on as well. It is ready for that.

It contains:
- Milter-Greylist 4.4.3
- SpamAssassin 3.4.0
- SpamAssassin Milter
- Clam AV integration (via Milter)
- GUI for the old BlueOnyx and the new BlueOnyx

New features:

The AV-SPAM GUI is now available in all supported GUI languages. English
and German should be pretty good. Spanish is more or less usable and the
other languages are as good as the usual Google translations get.

The menu structure changed. The main server-wide configuration of all
AV-SPAM related services moved to "Server Management" / "Network
Services" / "AV-SPAM". The siteAdmin GUI pages to edit the SpamAssassin
settings are now on the same page where you edit a users details in the
user management and is loaded via a GUI plugin. Just check the "SPAM"
tab on that page. The "Personal Profile" entry also got merged into
"Personal Profile" / "Email" as an extra tab that's also realized with
the same plugin technology.

That way the AV-SPAM integrates a lot more seamless into the BlueOnyx
GUI and it no longer looks like a foreign object.

Milter-Greylist: It is now possible to edit the most important
Milter-Greylist settings via the GUI ("Network Settings" / "Services" /
"AV-SPAM" - see the "Network" tab on that page.

This allows to configure the Greylist delay and for how many days the
automatic whitelisting should be valid. Additionally you can now specify
IP addresses and network address ranges for which greylisting should be
disabled, so that emails from these sources are accepted without delay.

SpamAssassin: The updated SpamAssassin 3.4.0 is again a lot better than
the previous versions. This time I also got the GeoIP support working
properly, which can greatly help the SPAM detection. Additionally the
GUI for users now allows some extra configuration that deal with
non-English or Asian character sets. Clients who send/receive emails in
non-English or in one of the Asian languages might want to enable these
settings.

MySQL-Backend: The MySQL backed of the AV-SPAM is now automatically
configured and set up. No more fiddling with the setup page for that. If
the GUI knows your MySQL login details, it'll set it all up
automatically. That way you can easily enjoy the benefits of the
SpamAssassin Auto-Whitelist and the Bayesian Database. Bayes
auto-learning is now on by default as soon as the MySQL backend is working.

Sendmail configuration: A lot of attention went into this. When the
AV-SPAM gets installed (or when you enable/disable Milter-Greylist,
SpamAssassin and/or Clam AV) your sendmail.mc will be rebuilt from
scratch. That copy then gets populated with *all* the Sendmail related
config changes that your old sendmail.mc had (including RBL blacklists!)
and is made active by building a sendmail.cf from it.

Active Monitor Integration: The AV-SPAM now integrates fully into
"Active Monitor". All AV-SPAM related services are monitored and their
status (and status changes) are reported by "Active Monitor". If a
service fails, Active Monitor automatically tries to restart it. If that
fails, it reports the failure. Both in the GUI and by Active Monitor emails.

That's it in a nutshell. If you have the old AV-SPAM, then please
upgrade ASAP to get rid of some of the problems and nuisances that the
old AV-SPAM had.

Upgrading instructions:
========================

1.) Uninstall the old AV-SPAM
2.) Uninstall the old Clam AV
3.) Run "yum clean all" and "yum update". Don't skip this step.
4.) "Software Updates" / "Third Party Software", Button "Check
Availability Now".
5.) Install Clam AV from NewLinQ.
6.) Install the AV-SPAM from NewLinQ.
7.) Go to "Server Management" / "Network Services" / "AV-SPAM". Make
sure "Milter-Greylist", "SpamAssassin" and "Clam AV" are enabled. Make
sure that MySQL is enabled and that the three checkboxes for "Use AWL",
"Use Bayes" and "Auto-Learning" are ticked.
8.) To confirm that everything is working, go to "Active Monitor" and
click the button to run a status check. The entry for "AV-SPAM Services"
should indicate no problems.

In closing:
============

This is a complete rewrite from scratch. Some very rudimentary parts of
the old AV-SPAM go back to the year 1998 and were initially written for
the Cobalt RaQ3. As the AV-SPAM got ported to other server platforms old
code got dropped, new code got added, but the basic design didn't change
much. It wasn't necessarily flawed, but years of changes and fixes
didn't make it pretty either.

With the influx of new coding ideas from coding the new BlueOnyx GUI I
started this one on a blank page and from the ground up. It was written
for 5208R first and then ported down step by step. All methods for
reading and writing data, for storing them in CODB or in config files
are entirely newly designed and use native BlueOnyx functions. Likewise:
The new BlueOnyx GUI had already been created with a future AV-SPAM
integration in mind, so that most of its GUI pages could simply be
loaded as modules into existing "stock" BlueOnyx GUI pages.

The overall result should be well worth it, as it now provides a fully
working and seamless integration that's ready for production.

Updates:
=========

Updates to the AV-SPAM (and Clam AV) will now only be published via
NewLinQ. Anyone who has purchased the AV-SPAM, has it linked via NewLinQ
and was still within the support period at 1st January 2014 (or later)
will see the updates available on NewLinQ.

Demo:
=====

The AV-SPAM is installed on the BlueOnyx Demo server, so you can take a
look at it there. The login details for the Demo server can be found
here: http://www.blueonyx.it/index.php?page=live-demo

Link to the AV-SPAM product page in the BlueOnyx Shop:
http://shop.blueonyx.it/av-spam.html

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber