Here is a mostly complete list of changes in the upcoming 4.0 version of ORF:

• Combined Actions: Tag and redirect email.
• Test Exceptions: This feature allows some tests to take precedence over blacklists (Attachment Blacklist, External Agents, AD Test and the Recipient Blacklist)—filtering for viruses even when the email would be whitelisted.
• New database model: Support for storing Greylisting and Auto Sender Whitelist data on Microsoft SQL Server. More reliable local database support.
• Subject logging: The name tells it all, email subjects at the On Arrival filtering point are now logged.
• Improved log filtering: Rule-based filtering in the ORF Log Viewer that provides much greater flexibility than the current filter.
• 64-bit support: Support for 64-bit editions of Windows Server.
• More types of supported IP range formats: no more subnet mask mess (except if you want).
• Greylisting improvement: Now Greylisting can be configured to accept delivery re-attempts from the same Class C (/24) block. This means lower number of false positives.
• Auto Sender Whitelist Automatic Response Detection: Namely, automatic recognition of Out of Office autoresponses. These are not added to the Auto Sender Whitelist, thus the database does not become polluted.
• Update notifications: the ORF Administration Tool, Log Viewer and Reporting Tool now tells you if there is a new ORF version available.
• Significantly improved PowerLog preprocessing speed: about 75 times faster now.
• All known bugs fixed.

Sorry about this. Due to unforeseen technical difficulties, we had to postpone ORF support for Exchange 2007 Server to the version after 4.0, in order to ship 4.0 as soon as possible (now within a few weeks). The 4.1 version will add Exchange 2007 only and we plan to release it within 2 months after ORF 4.0.

In my next post, I will talk about what actually got into 4.0.

Would not it be nice, instead of writing your own log parser? Now it is possible! We took ORF’s reliable log parser from the Log Viewer, packaged into an OLE DB database provider and now you can read ORF logs as database tables from ADO or ADO.NET.

What it is good for? That only depends on you. You can import the parsed logs into SQL databases, generate weekly reports for the end users about blacklisted emails, write custom email notifications, use the logs as a feed for a custom blacklist, etc.

The provider is shipped with detailed documentation and examples in 12 languages/technologies:

• Microsoft® Visual C#®
• Microsoft® Visual Basic.NET®
• Microsoft® Visual C++®
• Classic ASP (VBScript/JScript)
• ASP.NET (C# and Visual Basic.NET®)
• VBScript (Windows® Scripting Host)
• JScript (Windows® Scripting Host)
• Borland® Delphi™
• PHP (Win32 only)
• Perl (Win32 only)
• Python (Win32 only)
• Ruby (Win32 only)

Get it today!

Recently I started getting spam to my personal email accounts with subjects that look like software development-related professional emails. Examples below:

These definitely catch my eye more than “YOU HAVE WON MICROSOFT GLOBAL E-MAIL LOTTERY”, but that’s just me—at least, I know a relatively few people who get exited when they see an email subject with a Delphi type casting like in the last example. I wonder if spammers just wanted to give their emails a professional-sounding “IT” subject or they have started to personalize the email subjects e.g. based on the site where they picked up the email address.

Did you experience something similar recently?