Hi, we are running 1.1.2.122 and I have a question regarding quarantine pruning. Aside from the time of receipt does SpamFilter add any other time stamps to a quarantined file that it would use for pruning? I ask because I changed our pruning interval from 3 days down to 2 however even when the time came for pruning to start (we had manually reviewed and deleted the quarantine for the first 3 days to tune the app) nothing is happening.

We estimate we have 220,000 items in our quarantine and all else works like a charm. As you can see auto pruning is needed in our situation. I have started and stopped the service, refreshed the quarantine a couple times (about a 15 minutes refresh time) still without success.

Any ideas what may be going on?

Wayne,

The quarantine is a feature that was added in a hurry to satisfy the immediate needs of some users. Being implemented so fast caused us to cut some corners and loose performance.

We are very close (estimating 3-7 days) to releasing a new build which has a completely revised quarantine. All quarantined emails will reside in a user-selectable database (MS Access, MS SQL, Oracle, MySQL). There will be a web interface available for end users to view/deliver/delete their own quarantined items. Administrators will still have an (highly improved in performance, refresh of seconds rather than minutes) GUI to admin the quarantine items. This shold solve all problems now present in the current version.

Roberto Franceschetti
LogSat Software

Hi Roberto, what about those of us who are not going to be able to move to the database quarantine immediately? Will there still be the option for a file based quarantine and will its workings be more optimized?

What are the limits for using access as your database? We experience about 50,000 quarantines per day, making for a rather large database in a short period of time. I ask because an access database can exist on the same machine as spamfilter and shouldn't require an extra license like SQL or Oracle would.

Also, what happens if your email gateway exists in a DMZ without access to any database servers, or if you have a database server in your DMZ what happens if you cannot access the spamfilter machine from inside with a web browser (web server on spamfilter box) or the web server can't query the database in the DMZ? I'm assuming the web interface needs apache or IIS to run the pages.

We thought about deciding to keep the file-based quarantine, but opted against it. Having two options in there was likley to cause more bugs and confusion than not. The new build will require a DB for the quarantine to work. SpamFilter will work without a DB configured, but the quarantine will not be available in that case. Pse note that MySQL is also free.

We havent' conmpleted testing yet, but our theory behind the DB was to improve performance. Using a file-based quarantine with 10+K files performs extremely poorly. The DB is working out extremely well. We haven't stress-tested Access yet, so don't have any numbers. An option we may add is to not store the email body to save space.

We're developing the web interface so that it can be placed on any webserver, the webserver will not need to access the SpamFilter's machine and/or its filesytem. The only resource the webserver will need to access it the database. We are developing in ASP and PHP.

Roberto Franceschetti
LogSat Software

At my company we are running two gateways load balanced.  With the new DB version of your software in this situation how will clients looking at their quarantined e-mail be handled?  Will we need to merge two DBs or can the DB be fed by two sources.  I am not very sharp with DB management\administration.

Hi Roberto,
Is the database going to be ODBC or directly calling the database? ODBC would allow for more options as far as windows goes. Then it would not matter what kind of database is used on Windows. I would think that it would make it easier to program by using ODBC instead of  trying to make the program work with mutiple type of databases.

Good point! We developed with fliexibility and functionality in mind. Right now with the filesystem-based quarantine you have two separate servers and two sets of quarantined items. The DB version is multi-server ready. Multiple SpamFilter servers should all point to the same database server (and same database of course). The quarantines from the separate servers are merged into one table (actually two, one for the to, from, subject etc, the other only for the msg body). Both the web interface the the SpamFilter GUIs will show the combined data in the quarantine, and both web and either SpamFIlter server can be used to process/expire/deliver any email, without caring which server actually quarantined it.

We may be releasing a beta version for testing within a few days, if request is high for it.

Roberto Franceschetti
LogSat Software

If you're familiar with UDL files, you'll be able to use any provider, ODBC or OLEDB, to connect to the DB. Connecting is not the problem, the issues are the different "features" different platforms offer. For example Access and MSSQL have auto-increment identity fields, Oracle doesn't and we have to use sequences and triggers in the database to emulate them. We're writing as simple SQL statements as we can, and we're getting there...

Roberto
LogSat Software

Hi Roberto,

I would like to Beta test on my SQL 2000 server to see how well it performs. I know my ISP clients would love to try the web interface. This would allow them to decide if they want a blocked email with out me having to spend hours daily checking the logs. I currently have turned qurantining off since I just don't have the free hours to review all the blocked emails so having them in quarantine is a waste of disk space.