MailCleaner OpenSource project status and future

New releases and patches informations

Moderators: Pascal, oanasutoiu, mentor, stephane, jorge, JohnMertz, bourgeois

Post Reply
olivier
Posts: 1348
Joined: Thu Jan 01, 1970 1:00 am
Contact:

MailCleaner OpenSource project status and future

Post by olivier » Thu Aug 07, 2008 9:31 am

Hi all,

here are the long awaited news !

As you may have seen, things are moving. The only visible point right now is the new forum's look. Hope you like it.
It is based on the current web interface that bundle with the Enterprise version. This new interface is really more professional and very well designed. It also comes with a great user manual and an Outlook spam reporting plugin.

Now for the "hidden part", MailCleaner has also greatly improved and there was huge and deep modifications. MailCleaner is now able to handle huge loads and has many more weapons not only to fight spam, but also to help secure valid trafic. The basic idea was to provide some filters that can be put in front of SpamAssassin in order to immediately classify what is clearly a spam or not. SA would then only be used when in doubt. This framework was introduced in the Enterprise version for more than a year now and in the OpenSource version with the 2007080901 Pre-Release patch that many of you are already running. Since then, we developped other modules and greatly improved this features.
This strategy proved to be the good choice, as a basic Enterprise Version has more than 99,8% of efficiency and can handle half a million mails per day on a single basic hardware (please note we're always talking about real accepted mail, not about connections or mails rejected at SMTP time which can virtually bump up scores). Along with some other commercial modules provided by third parties, we have a solution that can combine many detection shemes and then lead to a near perfect detection rate with even better performances. It's also very robust as spammers will have great pain to get through all these different filters.

The latest two years were very intensive. Not only we had to continue to adapt our rulesets and databases, but we also had to deal with the large increase of overall message volume. Morover, in order to be able to keep the project improving in terme of functionalities, we decided to modify the commercial aspects of the product. So here are how things will go from now:

Commercial versions will be splitted in two main products:
- the Enterprise Version, which includes full support, full features and every 15 minutes updates of the whole solution (rules, databases, engine, OS, etc...).
- a basic version will include restricted support. This version will probably miss some features that are basically only required by huge infrastructures. Features may eventually be bought and added to this version. The system will also benefits from the updates but on a per day basis. We believe this version should be perfect for small web hosters and people that don't requires too much support or specific features and just can't afford the full version price. We also plan to provide an even cheaper version of this that can be updated on-demand. That is you install it, and then choose whenever you want the databases to be updated. This will give you full control of the price of the solution. It is still in discution on our side to decide whenever this feature will be available to the free OpenSource version or not.

The OpenSource version will still be provided. And it will be closely based on the full version. Some features, or default configurations may be missing though, but nothing critical to keep the product running. Basically, the look and feel will be as professional as the Commercial versions, but will be flagged as OpenSource and free. Of course, some proprietary modules provided by third parties won't be available, but the modules we developped in-house will be there. Our idea is still to keep the OpenSource version as close as possible of the Commercial version, but have a way to clearly distinguish it. All in one this will be a win-win solution as things will be more clearly defined and the OpenSource version will be far more professional. This version will be perfect for those who wants to build and manage their own rulesets and databases. They will have a free and professional security mail gateway.

Our main idea was to keep the best OpenSource version of MailCleaner that we can. We noticed however that many people are simply installing the free product, configuring some domains and then, when the filtering efficiency start dropping, starts to complain that the product is not good. This is a problem for everyone as the product image is hurted by this feeling and even if the administrator know the reason, the end users still end up with a bad feeling.
So we decided to help administrators keep their solution as efficient as they wish. The different pricing and update models will allow them to choose in a range of solutions starting from a free one that has to be maintained and with a maybe lower efficiency, to a more expensive one that will bring them an "almost perfect" filter with zero-admin.

Now for the release date... We have now released our latest Enterprise version that has all the features and base required for the next step. The user gui has been completly redesigned and we are currently working on the admin gui. Once this is finished, we will produce the new range of installation CDs and start releasing the different versions. We hope to start this process by the end of November. We will try to give you as more informations as we can about the progress. So that you can have a clear idea of the project status.
olivier
Posts: 1348
Joined: Thu Jan 01, 1970 1:00 am
Contact:

Re: MailCleaner OpenSource project status and future

Post by olivier » Thu Aug 07, 2008 7:29 pm

if you want to share any comment on this post, feel free to do it there http://forum.mailcleaner.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=767
Post Reply