Release 2.5 Announcement

I’m pleased to announce the 2.5 release of the MailChannels platform. This release comes six months after our 2.0 release, bringing with it substantial improvements in a number of key areas. I’ll highlight just a few of the major improvements in this blog post; however, I encourage our users to visit our customer knowledge base for the full details.

Performance Improvements

Performance is a key differentiating factor in the MailChannels outbound email filtering solution – whether it’s processing mail quickly or handling enormous connection concurrency, we aim to be the fastest in the world. The 2.0 release introduced a lot of new features, and making those features run fast at scale is something we’re obviously highly committed to. We’re processing upwards of 20,000 connections per second at some of our larger sites, and this level of traffic, combined with the extensive user behaviour tracking capabilities in the 2.0 platform had challenged some of our design assumptions. In 2.5, performance is greatly improved when fetching large sets of behaviour data for a sender. Database compaction settings have been optimized, reducing lookup times, conserving disk space, and improving write speeds. And we have implemented a better data expiry approach that further improves performance and reduces disk space requirements.

APIs

MailChannels customers tend to be control freaks, with a penchant for programming. For this reason, we have added APIs allowing the programmatic control of almost every aspect of our solution. These new APIs make it possible to fully automate the deployment of the MailChannels solution using tools like Opscode Chef. Use our APIs to search message delivery logs, manipulate policy scripts and lists, and change configuration settings across entire clusters.

RedHat Enterprise Support

You asked, and we’ve heard you. MailChannels has long supported Ubuntu because of its out-of-the-box kernel support for transparent proxying. The RedHat Enterprise 6.0 release added this goodness to the kernel, so we decided it was high time to publish officially supported RedHat packages. For repository information, please contact support.

Monitoring Service

We often provide a “high touch” relationship with our customers. Over the years, we built up server monitoring capabilities for some higher end customers. We’ve now standardized that offering and have added specific tools to monitor the health of email traffic. Monitoring is available for a reasonable monthly or annual fee. Ask us for more information about this new service.

Other Stuff

• XCLIENT support – for Postfix junkies, XCLIENT support means we can pass the original IP address and RDNS information to your downstream Postfix box. Useful for intercepting mail from authenticated users before a Postfix box processes it.
• LDAP authentication – you can now configure the web console to authenticate users via LDAP (aka Active Directory).
• Customizable email notification templates – policy scripts can send notifications when interesting things happen (such as a user starting to send spam). Customizable templates mean you can customize the notification messages.
• Policy logging – in 2.0 we introduced a JavaScript engine for writing email policy scripts. Now you can enable detailed logging of each policy script execution, which can help to track down issues.

We look forward to our next major release, which is slated for mid-2013. Until then, don’t hesitate to file a ticket with our support system if you have any additional questions about this release. If you’re a customer, we’ll be contacting you soon with instructions for upgrading.