MailScanner Adds New Features

So what exactly has changed? The full changelog is quite long, but there are a couple of items that are really cool:

1. Caching
2. Cache Stats
3. More command line options
4. More verbose 'ps' output
5. Greater speed

The caching is a really welcome feature, which basically works by examining spam and virus laden messages to see if they have been "seen" previously. If they have no further checks are done and the message is treated appropriately. What this means in reality is that a gateway server processing thousands of messages per hour can handle increased volumes with greater ease and efficiency, as it is not duplicating processes. The cache stats are fairly self-explanatory, but to illustrate it here's an example output: analyse_SpamAssassin_cache --------- TOTALS --------- Total records: 416 First seen (oldest): 780066 sec First seen (newest): 20 sec Last seen (oldest): 780066 sec Last seen (newest): 20 sec Cache Hit Rate 14% -------- NON-SPAM -------- Total records: 56 First seen (oldest): 2417 sec First seen (newest): 79 sec Last seen (oldest): 2417 sec Last seen (newest): 79 sec -------- LOW-SPAM -------- Total records: 11 First seen (oldest): 1898 sec First seen (newest): 20 sec Last seen (oldest): 1898 sec Last seen (newest): 20 sec ------- HIGH-SPAM -------- Total records: 294 First seen (oldest): 32914 sec First seen (newest): 23 sec Last seen (oldest): 11378 sec Last seen (newest): 23 sec -------- VIRUSES -------- Total records: 42 First seen (oldest): 172037 sec First seen (newest): 718 sec Last seen (oldest): 172037 sec Last seen (newest): 718 sec ----- TOP 5 HASHES ------- MD5 COUNT FIRST LAST ebfb6e87803d5aa03bb65bbbe2308c52 22 20817 741 775c8a213d71b1b9c0ad42122786db76 17 32914 4872 b0d976155f7dc386d050c9661db54572 5 12893 2297 095f58b53cc322ef089437fb6d76c7fa 4 11967 7302 2260d31a79a07ca8d39edd05b3a9969c 4 10997 2292 You can change the cache settings via SA.pm The new command line options should help debug and identify possible issues: --lint Similar to the SpamAssassin command. It checks your configuration for any syntax errors etc., --debug If, like me. you were tired of editing your MailScanner.conf to enable debugging you can now do so via a simple command line switch: MailScanner --debug You can now check which options are available using --help With regard to speed it seems that Julian has been optimising a lot of the code for the various MTAs while the caching itself brings obvious benefits.