How to find blocked messages when you are hosting your e-mail with Microsoft 365. With this setup your e-mail can be blocked, quarantined or junked in three (3) different places.

This release increases the maximum SPF DNS lookup recursions from 10 to 20.

This minor update resolves a dynamic scoring issue related to Geo-Location analysis.

Updates to e-mail Authentication mechanisms, IP-Rev, SPF, DKIM, DMARC and dynamic profiling.

Updates to e-mail Authentication mechanisms, IP-Rev, SPF, DKIM, DMARC and dynamic profiling.

E-mail Authentication has become important but the topic can be a bit daunting. Here's what you need to know to get up-to-date with your e-mail authentication needs on PerfectMail.

Updated e-mail Authentication, IP-Rev, SPF, DKIM, DMARC and more.

A minor bug fix in the licensing module.

An update containing improvements and bug fixes.

An update containing improvements and bug fixes.

A series of minor updates from 2020 to 2022, consisting of various minor fixes and improvements.

An update containing improvements and bug fixes will roll out from Jan 9-13.

Changes

• Remove .doc mismatch as a spam indicator; too many false positives.
• Deal with a sitation where mail from an outbound relay server is destined for a protected domain. The mail is marked as outbound when it stays within the organization. In this case mark messages as Accepted.
• Update UTM analysis to limit scoring to a single spoofing instance.

Changes

• Reduce default scores for macros.
• Separate scores for macros found in DOC97 documents, from macro document types.
• Modify macro scoring to only occur once on a message.

Changes

• Improvements to rxScanner link analysis.
• pmTrie - skip past leading text.
• Reorganize user directories to avoid conflicts with system files in the domain directory (preventative).

Changes

• reimplementation of opendkim which was disabled for testing.
• Add code to system startup to reset udev settings so we can work with migrated VMs where network interfaces are locked into specific network devices. Good for plug and play, but no good for VM migration.

Changes

• Fix minor bug in version display for update notification.
• Update html analysis command line program to display links with their included text, for analysis.
• Add an adjustment function to put a ceiling on rxScanner score amplitude.
• Update UTM scanning - update code to skip past any leading txt, if configured.
• Update All_urls url scraping to capture more urls during html structure analysis.

Changes

• Append links to stripped html content for rxScanner matching. rxScanner was looking at displayed text and missing some useful link values. Several link values are now appended to the end of link text for analysis.
• Update domain_addr page to insert a (hidden) default submit button. Hitting enter was not giving the correct behaviour.
• Update rxScan searching to look for name subject body searching against name subject and urls. All urls (to max limit) are concatenated together for name subject body search. A hack to allow additional rxScanner signatures.

Changes

• Modify anti-virus to disable heuristics scanning on "no filter" addresses, or outbound whitelist addresses.

Changes

• Add geofilter_priority switch to prioritize GeoRegional filtering as a priority over other filtering, such as whitelisting.

Changes

• Update rxScanner link parsing and analysis code.
• Update html_analysis script to include an option for printing text+url list.
• Fix minor bug in upgrade email script that misidentifies the release notes for a version; the release type number is now stripped from the version.

Changes

• Change miner reject from permanent to temporary failure to defend against lost mail.
• Add verbosity to SCORE file for when filtering or attachment filtering is disabled for a user.
• Add scoring for control characters embedded in mail headers (should not happen).
• Improvements to SPF scanning.

Changes

• Update hashing functions to take into account a minimum hash complexity required before any scoring can happen, to avoid punishing simple hash lines that result from simple message structures.
• Fix bug where domain settings were becoming corrupted in memory. At least protect PM from this situation.
• Rework domain settings load to be done directly from disk instead of keeping values in memory.
• Move domain settings from in-memory lookup to functions that read settings from disk.

Changes

• Update documentation generation files.
• Add command line switches to pmWatch (-h and -v). The old display (verbose) is available with -v. The new display is a single line summary.
• Concurrency update: add file locking to addr_list_loading
• String Library: Create function str_ctrl_cnt() to count the number of control characters (i.e. non-printable) in a string.

Changes

• Move user configs into /var/pm/config/domains/{domain}/users
• Fix bug where filter_attach setting for a user was disabling content filtering.
• Move user settings into user config directory; user configs were directly inside the domain config directory.
• Cleanup default perfectmail config file.

Maintenance release improves performance when the system is under heavy load, filtering and resolves some recently reported issues.

Code improvements and bug fixes.

Minor bug fix addressing server maintenance issues.

Maintenance release update

Changes

• Fixed an issue in the attachment decoding code where messages containing > 5000 attachments could crash the service.
• Email Activity Report generation had broke due to changes in end user maintenance.

Changes

• Server Admin > MTA update bug
• End User Maintenance: Improved address pruning logic
• End User Maintenance: Auto-discover hosted addresses on password change request
• Security: Add timeout value for password change request emails
• SPF library code improvement

Changes

• Implement new integrated RAR archive parser
• Continued code improvements to mime parsing and attachment scanning
• Improved blocking of dangerous attachments contained in ZIP archives
• Additional blocking for dangerous attachments contained in RAR archives

Changes

• Creation of the new change-log on the PerfectMail website (this!)
• Dashboard link to the new change-log on the PerfectMail website
• User-trim algorithm improvements
• Bug: Validation script incorrectly disables SMTP Recipient filter switch for hosted domains
• Code improvements to mime parsing and attachment scanning; additional blocking for dangerous attachments contained in ZIP archives

What can an organization do to avoid having its important email correspondence getting stuck in a spam filter. In this article anti-spam developer David Rutherford offers 10 tips for ensuring your email message get through the spam filters.

In this post, I cover two more things that you should never, ever do... Sending e-mail using your home broadband Internet connection, and Contracting out your bulk e-mail campaigns to the wrong partner.

Today, fast and reliable Internet connections (via cable, fibre and phone lines) are available to most people. Your Internet connection may even be faster than what you have at work.

There are some bad e-mail practices, that even the biggest companies engage in, that pretty much ensure that your e-mail will end up in a spam filter trash can... As a an antispam vendor we regularly see companies cut corners and make these critical mistakes: Deploying ad-hoc E-Mail Servers for E-Mail Marketing Campaigns, and... Buying E-mail Marketing Lists.

I'm going to begin this series of blog posts by talking about these two major mistakes you should never make...

Evidence shows that there is a thriving black market for personal information. Almost anything that can be stolen can be sold to somebody.

How is this information stolen? By crafting e-mails that look like they came from a trusted site (your bank, a popular website, etc.) that lead you to divulge personal information.

How many messages do you get a day? 20, 50, 100? Think again. I get between 200 to 400+ messages per day and sometimes as much as 500+ messages per day. How do you manage this much e-mail and still remain productive?

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Musings from the PerfectMail team about running an effective and efficient e-mail infrastructure - with an emphasis on e-mail hygiene and best practices.

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