ConfigServer Services Blog

MailScanner Poll – Please Vote

We’re considering an alternative method for configuring MailScanner on cPanel servers, possibly in addition to the current method, or as a replacement.The new method only scans incoming email. Outgoing email from the server is passed directly through exim (as if MailScanner were not installed) and can offer significant improvements to server performance, especially for those that host large mailing lists.The current default when installing MailScanner using our script is to only scan incoming email anyway, but all email mst still pass through MailScanner whether it is scanned or not.It would help us decide whether to pursue this (we will have to get cPanel to make a configuration option change for exim to do this) if you could vote in this poll:

Which email direction do you prefer MailScanner to scan emails (for spam and/or viruses)?

Option Votes %
Incoming emails only (current default)? 111 72.5
Incoming and Outgoing emails? 42 27.5
Total votes: 153

New cmm v1.06

Changes:

  • Modified to not follow symlinks introduced in cPanel v11 for any actions which, if the main account is emptied, could lead to the emptying of all email accounts within the tree
  • Added compatibility with cPanel v11 WHM theme
  • Fixed issue where valiases/vfilters files were not being created with the correct file ownership

New cmq v1.06

Changes in v1.05:

  • Added option to view queued email subject
  • Added option to search queued email by subject text match
  • Added compatibility with cPanel v11 WHM theme

Changes in v1.06:

  • Added option to search queued email by header text match
  • Added option to search queued email by body text match

Root crontab emails not being delivered

Just experienced an issue in cPanel v11 where root crontab emails aren’t being delivered. The jobs in /etc/cron.*/ work OK, but jobs in /var/spool/cron/root are failing to send emails to the root forwarder. It’s most likely a bug in the cPanel exim routers in v11.In the meantime, if you experience this problem, you can work around it by adding:

crontab -e

Then at the top of the root crontab set MAILTO= to your email address, e.g.:

MAILTO=me@mydomain.com

SpamAssassin v3.2.0 can cause very high loads in MailScanner

There is a bug in many rules that used to work fine for versions of SpamAssassin prior to v3.2.0. This new release affects some regex traps when non-ascii characters are pushed through them. The generated error causes the SpamAssassin checks in MailScanner to loop which can result in extraordinary high server loads.The included SpamAssassin rules with v3.2.0 appear to be fine (to our knowledge at present) but some third-party ones are not. These include some from the SARE repository used by the openprotect service:http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/spamassassin/users/100450It’s worth noting that we have only seen this issue arise on one server so far since the release of SpamAssassin v3.2.0.If you experience this problem, or want to avoid it, you will have to disable the openprotect rules from our MailScanner package script /root/sa_rules.shYou can do this by commenting out the appropriate line so that the file looks like:

#!/bin/sh/usr/bin/sa-update#/usr/bin/sa-update –nogpg –channel saupdates.openprotect.com/sbin/service MailScanner reload

You then need to remove any download rules using:

rm -Rfv /var/lib/spamassassin/3.002000/saupdates_openprotect_com/

You can then re-enable by removing the # in the openprotect line in /root/sa_rules.sh once these issues have been fixed.Of course, the downside to all this is that SpamAssassin will be less able to assign higher scores to likely spam.

New MailScanner Front-End (MSFE) v4.11

Changes:

  • Modified to work with cPanel v11 new theme API and new WHM theme style. This version will only work with cPanel v11 and cannot be upgraded to from cPanel v10. Third party themes need to properly support the new v11 theme API to work. If MailScanner doesn’t appear then you need to contact your third party theme developer and ask them to fully support the cPanel v11 API (i.e. including cPanel Plugins)
  • Fixed issue with saving cPanel User Settings in WHM for the alternative email address for the spam forwarder

MailScanner disabled after cPanel upgrade to v11

If you find MailScanner is disabled after upgrading to v11 of cPanel (esp. since v11 is now in CURRENT) then run the following:

/scripts/buildeximconf/scripts/mailscannerupdateservice exim restart

That should get things working again. We will be releasing a new version of MSFE soon to support the new v11 theme API.