It is a question that comes up frequently at our Tech Support – OK, the email was blacklisted by the Sender Blacklist, but which item triggered the blacklisting exactly?

The upcoming ORF release will offer three handy improvements to help answering these questions.

Predecessors of ORF 5 already support entering optional comments with IP, email, keyword, etc. expressions and these are logged on a hit. This can help identifying the expression in question. Due to a technical constraint, however, these comments were logged as “(Unicode comment cannot be displayed)” if they contained any characters outside the 7-bit ASCII table, which is pretty much the Latin alphabet and numbers only. We overcame this constraint in ORF 5 and now the logged comments are fully Unicode-compliant. Let you speak Russian or Danish, you can use your national alphabet without limitation.

Expression comments are sadly omitted in many cases, though, and ORF has nothing to log. Nothing is lost either; we have two features for these cases.

The first one is very simple: one-click sortable lists. Remember the Sort button next to the lists in ORF 4? It is gone. It really should not have been there in the first place. Bad, bad Sort button. Lists are ought to get sorted by one click in the header, because that is the maximum effort to be exerted to make order and find things.

The second one is a bit more exciting: the Test button that took over the place of the Sort button (which is, again, gone, forever) for every major list. Say you want figure out which Sender Blacklist expression blacklisted emails from my-bosses-best-friend@example.com (ouch!), but the log did not reveal any further information. Just click Test, enter my-bosses-best-friend@example.com and you will get a live, editable list of expressions matching that address. Like *@example.com. Turns out it was not the best.idea.ever, but hey, now you can fix it.

Stay tuned, we are coming back with more next week.

One of the biggest changes on the website coming with ORF 5 will be the introduction of a brand new Client Portal which will replace the Customers Area currently used on our website. The online services will add number of features and integrate others. Some features are a direct result of changes in the licensing while others are usability improvements to improve your ORF experience. Here is a quick summary of 2 key features:

Managing multiple companies

First some technical background. After the launch of ORF 5, customer accounts will be disassembled into individual user accounts and company accounts. This will allow role based management of company accounts and management of multiple company accounts by a single user. In order to facilitate this, users managing multiple company accounts will be able to select which company they want to work with within the Client Portal.

In the screenshot above, you can see the website header which will be the basis for navigating through your companies where ever you are on the website. Clicking the “Change” button (2) will show a dialog where all manageable companies are listed with some key information in order to make identification easier. From then its just a click of a button to make the selection the active company on the Client Portal.

License Management

A separate licenses page will give an overview of the licenses handled by your company. The list is ordered by date and the individual license details can be opened and closed using a simple chevron mechanic. An overview of the licenses can also be found on the My Company: Overview page as well to give you a quick glance at the status of your licenses. If one or more of the licenses are within the renewal period, you can renew your license from here with one click of a button.

This concludes the quick sneak-peek at some of the features of the Client Portal. Stay tuned for more next week.

In this sixth article of our ORF 5 series, we look into two minor improvements the new ORF release will offer.

Noticed that blue thing below the menu? That is the brand new and shiny toolbar, implemented in all three administrative tools of ORF.

True to the role of toolbars, this one brings the most frequently used actions right under your fingertips (1). The dropdown design also acts as a secondary shortcut menu, making the tools more discoverable and faster to use (2).

You will find the the connection information here (3) which helps identifying which ORF installation your are currently working with.

The toolbar also hosts another new feature, the Notifications button (see screenshots below).

Basically, this is the entry point of ORF’s new asynchronous notifications system. This is meant to eliminate situations when you get interrupted by randomly popping up dialogs like “Hey there’s a new version available!”, “You really should do something about these waiting items!” or “Look, I can create dialog boxes out of nowhere HAHAHA isn’t it great?”. There are many background operations in ORF, from checking for updates, to querying the status of the Transport Agents. All these operations may required your attention occassionally but from ORF 5, they are all neatly line up here.

As you have probably noticed, ORF 5 gets a pretty intensive facelift along with the numerous usability improvements. This design philosophy will also be visible on the ORF website. Let’s look at one of these in detail.

Knowledge Base

Experienced ORF users will be familiar with the FAQ found on our website. As the name suggests, we tried to collect and categorize frequent problems that ORF users faced and gave suggestions on how to work the problem.

In ORF 5, FAQ will be replaced by a Knowledge Base section that will provide a more user friendly and intuitive interface to find the required content. The KB will be a searchable source of information on all of the topics covered by the FAQ as well as brand new articles. As you can see in the first screenshot, navigating through the knowledge base will be based around the search function.

The search box will have all the functions of advanced search including partial matches and wildcards. Within the results of the search, the keywords will be highlighted to show the context of the words. Clicking on a topic title will take you to the full article. Navigating back to the search results will take you back to the search result list with the keywords still highlighted. This will allow you to look through the search results without having to repeat the search.

Ratings and Comments

One of the coolest features of the new KB is the ability for you to rate each article in the Knowledge Base on the basis of relevance and conciseness.

Giving a rating of 4 stars or less (5 is the maximum), you will be able to write a short comment on the article to give us feedback on how we could improve the text. The whole process takes a few seconds while it provides us with excellent information on how we can tailor the article to your needs.

The Knowledge Base function is only one of many interactive features in the new ORF website that will help with the communication between our users (you) and us. We will be showcasing more of these in future blog articles so stay tuned.

The next cool feature of ORF 5 we are about to show falls into the category where the new version offers the most: overall experience improvements.

The Log Event View already exists in previous versions – this is the dialog you get when you double-click an event in the Log Viewer. In ORF 5, it underwent an major renovation:

I guess it is a fine example of how a picture is worth a thousand words. Now let’s see what’s new in there besides the aesthetic improvements.

1) Grouping and Highlighting: Every logged event has 16 fields. Each one carries useful information, but you rarely need all of them, so we grouped the fields and hid many lesser used fields to reduce the information load. The Email Subject and the Event Message columns are now highlighted.

2) Event Summary: Each event gets a one-sentence automatically generated summary. This will primarily benefit those new to ORF, but could provide everyone a quick overview of the event and its significance.

3) Remote Control Integration: Now you can send IP and email addresses to the ORF configuration from this dialog.

4) Integrated Log Knowledge Base: This is the coolest new stuff in here. No idea what a log message means? What are its implications? What action to take? Click the Explain button to look the event up online and get a knowledge base article specifically crafted for the logged event.

We expect this to become a major self-help option, because in a huge number of technical support cases the administrator finds the log message, but not sure what to do with it. Say, you run into a DNS timeout or SERVFAIL warning event. Many questions arise: how do I fix this? Does it has to be fixed at all? Does this mean the Vogon fleet is about to blow up Earth? Or is it the Klingons? Goa’ulds? Is the l33t Jeff Goldblum really our only hope? These are particularly complex questions that a short log message cannot volunteer to explain, but using this feature we will deliver the latest information right there where you need it.

Stay with us, next week we will look into another new feature.

Configuration Synchronization is an enterprise service in ORF 5 which helps organizations to reduce the administrative overhead of maintaining multiple ORF servers. This feature allows appointing a central settings repository server (“Publisher”) and takes care of distributing the setting changes to the rest of the servers (“Subscribers”).

The audience of this feature are organizations who maintain multiple ORF installations, e.g.

• Companies with two or more ORF servers on their network (e.g. one on the primary MX, another on the secondary MX)
• IT shops who manage the ORF installations of their clients centrally.

Back to the technical details, subscriber servers periodically check the publisher server for configuration changes. When a change is encountered, subscribers download the publisher configuration and reinitialize with the latest settings.

The entire process utilizes the same communication foundation as introduced in our previous Remote Access article. Thanks to this, administrators can grant Config Sync-only access to the subscriber clients.

In addition to the full configuration synchronization, ORF 5 also allows overriding certain settings from the publisher. This is called “localization” in ORF – when you “localize” something, the local settings of the subscriber will take effect, overriding the publisher settings.

ORF 5 has two localization scopes: Path Localization and Feature Localization.

Path Localizations are for overriding file system path settings, e.g. the path to the log files. This comes handy if the publisher and the subscriber servers are almost identical, having same role and location within the network, but the file system paths are different.

Feature Localizations allow overriding entire features, like the Intermediate Host List or the Sender Whitelist (a “feature” is something that has its own page in the ORF Administration Tool). This allows a versatile range of localizations, e.g. a different Intermediate Host List for a different location within the network.

As for fault tolerance questions, subscribers can operate with the last known configuration indefinitely if the publisher is not available for any reason (at least one successful initial sync is required, though).

Screenshots (some of the UI is subject to change):

Questions? Comments? Let us know.

The first new feature we are detailing in this article series is the Remote Administration in ORF 5.

This feature is pretty much what it sounds: in ORF 5, you can access and manage remote ORF installations with just one click – no more RDP, VNC or walking up to the server room. Sounds good?

There is also more to Remote Administration than just shaving off a couple of minutes here and there: the Remote Access communication foundation that enables this feature also opens up a way for remote ORF components to talk to each other. For instance, ORF 5′s Configuration Synchronization relies on this very same foundation and certain future developments are enabled by this.

A few basic facts:

• Remote Access can be enabled using the Administration Tool (disabled by default).
• All ORF management tools are supported (Administration Tool, Log Viewer and the Reporting Tool).
• Default connections can be configured (useful if you always work with the same server). Shortcuts can be created per management tool for multiple-server scenarios.
• ORF 5 Setup comes in two versions: a full setup and a freely distributable Management Tools-only setup.

Security and network facts (nobody likes opening ports in the firewall, right?):

• Accessing the service requires an administrator-configured password.
• The default communication port is TCP/6242 (can be changed per interface).
• Communication is HTTP-based – a slightly modified version of the SOAP protocol, typically used for Web Services.
• The password is never stored directly on the computer (only hash on the server, salted hash on the clients).
• Secured challenge-response authentication. No plain-text password is sent over the network. VPN can be employed for additional security.
• Service can be restricted to specific local interfaces/IPs.
• Access can be granted by client IP addresses.
• HTTP proxies are supported by the communication protocol.

And now a few screenshots.

What do you think? Will you use this feature? Got any questions? Feel free to comment.

In the early days of planning ORF 5, we took a short break from the usual rush to see where we are now with ORF.

It was refreshing – frankly I could almost feel the summer ocean breeze. Focusing on a single thing for an entire week feels like luxury in a small team, where so few people have so many responsibilities.

It was also a break worth taking, because ORF has changed a lot since the launch back in 2002. What we have found was a fully grown product, reaching and surpassing competitors in its core functionality of spam filtering. A couple of months later our success on the VBSpam test series just underlined this – 5 testing rounds, 5 awards, over 700,000 emails, 99.11% spam catch rate, 0.0017% false positives (that is, one case of false positive for every 58422 emails).

So when the question came up “What is the best way to add value to ORF now?”, we felt this time the right answer is not just to add another spam filtering technology.

If you are into sci-fi like me, you probably know the closer your spaceship gets to the speed of light, the same increase in the velocity will require more and more energy. Similarly, in spam filtering, improving the spam catch rate by 0.5% from 99% will take tremendously more effort than from 95%. Also, the closer you get to 100% the higher the chance for false positives, similarly how running faster into a standing Vogon fleet would hurt your more (and generally, you do not want to run into Vogons at all).

This is why ORF 5 puts the administrator in focus. Given a fixed time frame, we believed we can add more value on this front. Your travel to Proxima Centauri might take 3 months more, but hey, when your sole company for 4.6 years is your ship’s computer, it better be more entertaining than Marvin the Paranoid Android, right?

In the upcoming articles in this series, we will look into the features ORF 5 has to offer and examine how they help the administrator’s work, from Configuration Synchronization to Asynchronous UI Notifications. On the TCO/ROI side, we will hear my colleague Andras Sűdy talking about how ORF cuts TCO and increases ROI. Ok, seriously, he will talk about the new ORF website, licensing and partner program – listen to the guy, he knows all the business kung-fu!

Stay tuned. See you next week and stay away from Vogons.