My staff is fond of reminding me that for about a day following the release of another big MDaemon version I have this habit of being very pleased with the result of our work but then, once we start on the next version, I consider the past stuff as not so great in comparison to what’s coming next. So, before I start on the next big thing, I want to reflect on some of the important milestones that MDaemon 9.60 represents for us and our customers.
Firstly, MDaemon 9.60 has been in development for over 8 months. One of the first things we did was move all the source code and build procedures off of Visual Studio 6 using Source Safe 6 and onto Visual Studio 2005 with Team Foundation Server. For a project that had been using those older tools for many years, this required an intense effort.
Next, I made it a point to re-visit some of the old “known issues” that dated back a long while and which have persisted due to design limitations. Several of these were happily fixed, which will make long time users of MDaemon very happy!
Several significant technological advances have made their way into MDaemon 9.60. These include support for image spam and child pornography detection and blocking which will be appearing in SecurityPlus for MDaemon soon. You’ll also like account grouping which allows you to arbitrarily define groups of users to which policy can be applied. We will be expanding on this capability throughout the 9.6 series. There is also support for sub-addressing which allows you to route email directly into various folders by using special email address forms.
One particularly exciting new capability is message certification. MDaemon now has the ability to check whether messages are “certified”. Certified messages can help you determine whether a message should be accepted or not. Alt-N offers a free certification service for MDaemon customers.
Backscatter Protection puts a stop to the problem of email backscatter - email your users receive telling them that a message they never sent in the first place failed to be delivered.
The gateway feature set is important to a large percentage of our customers and has seen numerous and significant improvements including a totally new email address verification system.
Don’t forget DKIM. DKIM was approved by the IETF as an industry standard and has been assigned as RFC 4871 (http://www.dkim.org/specs/rfc4871-dkimbase.pdf). Naturally, MDaemon 9.60 contains a completely up-to-date and thorough implementation of this email authentication method.
On top of all this, several performance improvements make this the best performing MDaemon ever!
In summary, MDaemon 9.60 includes some 69 new features - 8 of them I’ve classified as major improvements - and 94 specific fixes and improvements to various customer requests. It is a major accomplishment for us. I hope you love it as much as I do! But, now, it’s onward to the next release!
Arvel
Links:
- MDaemon 9.6 Release notes
- New customers, Evaluate MDaemon 9.6 for free
- Existing customers, upgrade to the new MDaemon 9.6
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2007 at 10:32 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.