What’s new in the Stretch guide?

Call me boring but I try to keep as many parts of the setup as in previous guides. Many of us are happy with their mail servers and want to change as little as possible. After all email is a boring matter anyway and we do our jobs best if our users don’t even realize we are there.

A few things though that are new in this version of the ISPmail guide:

  • Better security against cryptographic hacks and brute force attacks. Newer software versions – it is a new Debian release after all. There are no breaking changes though – mainly bugfixes and security enhancements. Business as usual.
  • MariaDB replaces MySQL. Do not worry. It is basically what you are used to. The original lead developer of MySQL forked it after Oracle assimilated the MySQL project. Both Google and the EU have invested serious amounts of money into MariaDB. So the Debian project decided to get rid of Oracle and rather stay with MariaDB.
  • rspamd replaces SpamAssassin. This is probably the biggest change. Provides many features like spam detection, malware scanning, greylisting, rate limiting and DKIM signing. Finally only one milter (Postfix plugin) to replace them all. You can block obvious spam emails before even accepting them onto your server. It is written in C and so scales much better in large environments. It has a nifty sexy web interface. And although the spam engine is not compatible to SpamAssassin there is a way to teach it your current spam emails.
  • Automatic ham/spam learning. Whenever a user moves a mail into or out of the Junk folder it will be learned automatically.

4 thoughts on “What’s new in the Stretch guide?”

  1. Ralf Luhrmann

    Hi Christoph,
    Thanks for this new guide. Followed your previous guide but used it with my openSUSE OS.

    I’d like to update my OS to a newer version but that would upgrade my postfix version from 2.11 to version 3.3 and Dovecot from version 2.2 to 2.3

    Do you know if the setup would still work without changes in the configuration?

    Kind regards
    Ralf

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