MPP provides one of the most accurate and comprehensive solutions to protect your email from spam, viruses, phishing, and fraud attacks. MPP offers two levels of spam protection: MPP Antispam which is pre-configured with open source antispam and antivirus modules; and MPP Premium Antispam that integrates commercial software to increase spam filter accuracy. All MPP solutions include a policy engine that enables configuration on a per-user, per-domain or per-direction basis, giving you the flexibility to master the constant challenge these threats have become.
MPP Antispam Features

• MPP improves the accuracy of open source spam filters by supporting native, intelligent URI black list, SURBL, URIBL and others.
• MPP is much faster than open source spam filters. This increased speed is due to how we implemented the technology.
• MPP reduces the burden on system and help desk administrators due to its intuitive and user-friendly end user quarantine interface.
• Best of breed open source and commercial antispam plug-ins for the best protection including Commtouch, Cloudmark, Mailshell, MDNA and SpamAssassin.

For the technically proficient, MPP offers the following features:

• Customize spam handling by integrating URI filters with MPP spam scoring.
• Fine tune how spam is handled with per-policy and per-user spam actions. Self-provision spam actions (quarantine, discard, reject, mark header, mark subject, deliver) to reduce the support burden.
• Dynamically block dictionary attackers, abusive senders, violators of spam traps or other repeat message system offenders.
• Fine tune spam scoring by aggregating the results of spam content modules, content inspection rules, RBL sites, SPF and SURBL. Custom spam scoring is used to mark the headers of email that violate RBL sites, avoid single test responses and many other applications.
• Multi-level WBL processing including SMTP level, per-user, per-policy and per-feature. Implement features like greylists or spam traps but exempt known IP’ s from tests.
• Integrated error checking easily removes poorly constructed spam.
• Greylisting and integrated Postfix Policy Server
• Stop offensive content, block email based on headers or more with MPP’s content inspection module.

MPP Antispam for Mac OS X Email Servers and Gateways
MPP For ISP’s
MPP Spam Quarantine Management

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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.

[display_podcast]

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.

[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[/tags]

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.

[display_podcast]

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.

[tags] quarantine, open source, email security, service providers, scalability, stop spam, end spam, protect email, archival, SQL, ESMTP, email database, queue, disc queue[/tags]