ANNOUNCE: amavisd-new-2.8.0 has been released

[Mark Martinec]

A long-awaited version 2.8.0 of amavisd-new has been released.
It is available at:

  http://www.ijs.si/software/amavisd/amavisd-new-2.8.0.tar.gz
    (984 KiB)
or:
  http://www.ijs.si/software/amavisd/amavisd-new-2.8.0.tar.xz
    (699 KiB)

Release notes are at:
  http://www.ijs.si/software/amavisd/release-notes.txt


amavisd-new-2.8.0 release notes


COMPATIBILITY

- removed an old compatibility measure: default value of @banned_admin_maps
  was changed from:
    @banned_admin_maps = (\$banned_admin, \%virus_admin, \$virus_admin);
  to a more consistent:
    @banned_admin_maps = (\$banned_admin);
  The previous default value of @banned_admin_maps tried to maintain
  compatibility with versions before the setting was separated from
  its companion @virus_admin_maps. Now this compatibility is no longer
  considered necessary and contributes to some confusion, so it was dropped.
  See 2.4.0 and 2.2.1 release notes for previous changes to this setting.

- quarantining to an mbox format file used to include a local time in an
  mbox separator line, which differs from RFC 4155 and common practices
  of using an UTC timestamp; a time zone of a timestamp in separator lines
  is now changed to UTC;


BUG FIXES

- fixed initial evaluation of dynamic (i.e. per policy bank) values of
  $enable_dkim_verification, $enable_dkim_signing and $bypass_decode_parts
  across all declared policy banks; these policy bank entries may be scalars
  of references to such;

- finely adjust a message size for de-stuffed dots according to a size
  definition in RFC 1870; avoids occasional message size mismatch when
  using an antispam interface module SpamdClient (implementing client-side
  of a spamc/spamd protocol);

- updated LDAP.ldif to match LDAP.schema; provided by Quanah Gibson-Mount;

- updated AMAVIS-MIB.txt and amavisd-snmp-subagent: changed type of
  SNMP variables *MsgsSize* in the group amavisStats 7 from Counter32
  to Counter64 for consistency with other *MsgsSize* variables in groups
  amavisStats 3 and amavisStats 9;

See also the bug fixes section of 2.7.1 and 2.7.2 release notes.
All fixes applied to 2.7.1 and 2.7.2 are incorporated in the 2.8.0 code.


NEW FEATURES SUMMARY

- For monitoring and statistics gathering purposes a new set of utilities
  and service processes is available based on a message passing paradigm,
  using a 0MQ (a.k.a. ZMQ, ZeroMQ, or Crossroads I/O) library. This
  replaces a functionally similar set of utilities based on a shared
  BerkeleyDB database, with a benefit of avoiding lock contention
  altogether. This can bring sigificant speedups, most pronounced on
  a host with many busy amavisd child processes.

- Applied numerous fine-grained optimizations based on a NYTProf profiler
  results. Optimizations include a reduction in a number of generated
  Perl opcodes and similar micro-optimizations. This accounts for a large
  amount of small changes in the code.

- Our current statistics (Q4 2011) shows that 80 % of messages are below
  30.000 bytes, and 90 % of mail messages are below 100.000 bytes in
  size. As an optimization, messages below 100 KiB in size are now kept
  and processed in memory, including passing them more optimally to
  SpamAssassin 3.4.0. Some file activity is still there, but is much
  reduced. If $TEMPBASE also resides on an SSD disk (or a RAM disk),
  observed speedup between 2.7.2 and 2.8.0 was 3 to 8 percent on a
  busy host (with monitoring disabled, so as not to skew a measurement).

- Use a module IO::Socket::IP if available, instead of dealing directly
  with low-level modules IO::Socket::INET and IO::Socket::INET6;

- choose more appropriate defaults if running on an IPv6-only host
  (like connecting to ::1 instead of 127.0.0.1 which may not exist);

- amavisd-release now also supports connecting to amavisd over IPv6;

- as a debugging aid it is now possible that a late event triggers full
  logging of earlier events that occurred during processing of a current
  mail message;

- $enable_ldap setting is now dynamic, i.e. can be changed by a policy
  bank, which makes it possible to selectively disable LDAP lookups
  per policy bank;

- optionally avoid persistent connections to SQL and LDAP servers;

- it is now possible to disable calling an external file(1) utility
  but still have MIME parts decoding enabled;

- added support in Amavis::SpamControl::ExtProg for an external spam scanner
  Bogofilter;

- added locking options to @spam_scanners entries, to be used with external
  scanners which need but do not implement locking of their resources
  by themselves;

- added a global configuration setting $sa_userprefs_file, which is passed
  on to SpamAssassin as a 'userprefs_filename' parameter at initialization;

- added a subroutine iso8601_weekday(), potentially useful with partitioning;

- added several new macros available to logging and notification templates;


Further details at:
  http://www.ijs.si/software/amavisd/release-notes.txt


Mark