What's New in this Release
Netscape Messaging Server 4.15 Patch 2 enables ESPs and ISPs to quickly build business-grade messaging services for conducting communication and commerce with entire communities of employees, partners, suppliers, and customers.
Features of Messaging Server 4.15 Patch 2 include:
- Configurable Security and Privacy fixes for Messenger Express.
- Netscape 6/Mozilla access fix to Messenger Express.
- MTA refresh enabled for specific configuration parameters.
- Store Recovery checkpoint enhancements.
- Updated Console for supporting Simplified Chinese.
Features of Messaging Server 4.15 Patch 1 include:
- Personal Address Book support on Solaris.
- Authenticated SMTP for Messenger Express.
- Mailstone support for Messenger Express.
- An improved UI for Mailstone.
Features of Messaging Server 4.15 include:
- Support for multiple platforms.
- U.S. domestic security support with Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140a.
- Messaging Multiplexor support of SSL, which enables offloading SSL handling from a Messaging Server to an MMP.
- Mailstone, a stress-testing tool that lets system administrators determine Netscape Messaging Server capacity by testing how the server performs under heavy loads.
- Messenger Express - an integrated email interface to Netscape
Messaging Server. Specific features of Messenger Express include:
- High Scalability for support of millions of users
- Highly customizable and extensible
- Advertising enabled
- Core email service feature support, including:
- Automatically create Inbox, Drafts, Sent, and Trash folders at first login
- View messages headers; sort by date, from, size, subject, or type (new/read)
- View received message; reply, reply all, forward
- Search for message within folder using the subject, from, body, or to fields
- Compose message, allow attachments, add recipients from LDAP search, set priority, return receipts
- Folder management, create, delete, rename
- Account summary: display email address, mailbox quota limit, current disk consumption
- Personal information settings: passwords, preferred language, reply to email address, vcard, text signature, forward email information, vacation message
- Other settings: Number of messages per page, delete style (IMAP style or trash style), purge deleted messages on logout, save copy of sent messages, save messages for draft, message display wrap, set color scheme, set toolbar (icons & text, icons only, text only), display font, font size
- POP collection allows users to collect messages from remote mailboxes and store them in a selected folder
Updated and New Configuration Options in 4.15 Patch 2
A variety of new configuration options have been added to provide additional flexibility and workarounds to known problems.
Note: After you set or change a parameter, be sure to stop/start or refresh the service.
- Deliver command should update quota information. (389534)
The deliver program is unable to update the quota information on a mailbox. Quota information is updated by smptd. Thus the deliver program is not able to push a message into the store itself (it requires a push through smtpd).
The deliver program has been changed so that the autocreate command will create the user's mailbox automaticall when the user does not exist. Autocreate gts the quota from LDAP. Quota check and update will work correctly. Use the autocreate -c command to automatically create user's mailboxes.
- Option to disable LDAP address search in the Personal Address
Book. (389784)
This option has been added to address security and privacy concerns. Messenger Express allows a user could create an LDAP query that would give information about other users from the LDAP directory. The following parameter has been added:
local.service.http.allowldapaddresssearch
If the parameter is set to no, no LDAP queries will be allowed except for Personal Address Book queries. By default, LDAP queries are allowed by any user through modification of Messenger Express URLs.
- HTTP service Proxy Domain behavior. (390241)
This option addresses security and privacy concerns. The following existing parameter is discussed:
service.http.proxydomainallowed
When set, the value is http:[SERVER_IP], where [SERVER_IP] is the IP address of the Messaging Server (or any other unlikely to match a client's address). This will only allow proxy logins from clients whose source IP addresses match the [SERVER_IP] part of the filter.
This is described under Creating Access Filters for HTTP Proxy Authentication.
- Mail Access Domain syntax. (390241)
The following existing parameter is discussed:
LDAP entry: mailAccessDomain
Starting with 4.15, the mailAccessDomain parameter supports multiple filters in a single attribute, separated by $, with either + or - denoting their disposition.
Full mailAccessDomain filter syntax is:
-
[+-] servicelist : clientlist ( $ [+-] servicelist : clientlist )*
like this:
-
+imap imapmmp:ALL$-pop popmmp:ALL
This will make it so that user can only access imap and imapmmp (no ssl).
- Messenger Express now supports sending authenticated
SMTP messages. (383050)
The following parameters have been added:
local.service.http.smtpauthuser
local.service.http.smtpauthpasswordThese parameters allow someone using Messenger Express to receive the same authenticated SMTP messages that they would normally receive using Netscape Communicator.
For this to work properly, the user ID and password given to the mshttpd must be a store administrator; they must exist in the store.admins list (for example, admin and admin).
After setting these parameters, any mail received in Messenger Express from an authenticated ME user should have the word "Internal" appearing next to the From header in the Message View window. Authenticated mail from ME will display the authenticated SMTP user name in the header instead of the actual user.
- The Resent-From header is always added when a
message is expanded from a mailing list. (381555)
The following parameter has been added to give you the option of modifying this behavior:
local.service.smtp.smtp-router.addresentfrom
When this parameter is set to no, and a message is submitted to a group, the recipients of that message will not see the Resent-From header. In all other cases, the Resent-From header will appear.
- New Parameter Added to adjust MTA Throttling. (386272)
The following parameter has been added to adjust MTA throttling:
local.service.smtp.throttlethreshold
Once the control queue is over the number set to this parameter, the server starts to throttle back the speed with which it accepts incoming connections. This makes it more difficult to grow the queue to an overwhelming number of messages.
If you set the throttle level too high, the accept rate will overwhelm the ability over the server to deliver all the messages it accepts.
The local.service.smtp.throttlethreshold parameter defines the throttle level. The default value is 2000 messages.
This parameter defines the maximum number of messages that will be processed at one time.
- Raw 8-bit header causes Javascript errors
in Messenger Express. (367500, 368796)
To avoid these errors, you can set the following parameters:
local.rfc822header.fixlang
local.rfc822header.fixcharset
local.rfc822header.allow8bitThe fixlang parameter specifies the two-letter language ID (for example, ko for Korean). This parameter must be used in conjunction with the fixcharset parameter, which specifies the character set name (for example, EUC-KR). Setting these two parameters causes Messenger Express to lose its multilingual capability, but it will avoid the Javascript errors that result from setting the allow8bit parameter.
If the local.rfc822header.allow8bit parameter is set to no then any 8-bit data encountered in a header is displayed as ?. If this parameter is set to yes then headers are run through a validity checker so that valid 8-bit characters can be displayed intact and invalid characters are shown as ?.
These parameters should be modified only under special circumstances. Contact Technical Support for assistance.
- Configurable received header required for High
Availability or other multi-instance environments where you
want to know which server is handling the mail.
(383012)
The following parameter has been added:
local.service.smtp.smtp-accept.receivedcomment
This replaces the default Received: field that the message store puts into the header of each message received by the message store. The string can have a mixture of text and the positionally-dependent arguments (each %s). For example:
Field 1: Product Name "Netscape Messaging Server"
Field 2: Product Version "4.15"Thus, a default release build received header looks similar to the following:
Received: from netscape.com ([207.1.151.156]) by <host>.<domain>.com
(Netscape Messaging Server 4.15) with ESMTP id FOM48800.N00 for
<user@netscape.com>; Wed, 19 Jan 2000 18:28:56 -0800Setting the local.service.smtp.smtp-accept.receivedcomment configuration parameter as follows:
# ./setconf local.service.smtp.smtp-accept.receivedcomment "AOL-%s v%s msg-system1"
produces received headers similar to the following:
Received: from netscape.com ([207.1.151.156]) by <host>.<domain>.com
(AOL-Netscape Messaging Server v4.15 msg-system1) with
ESMTP id FOM6N700.S00 for <user@netscape.com>;
Wed, 19 Jan 2000 19:21:07 -0800The parameter will be truncated to a max of 200 characters. You could even configure the parameter as "" and you should get the minimal received comment of ().
There are a few related extensions to the Protocol plugin properties:
SMTP_PPP_RECEIVEDCOMMENT: overrides comment per-connection SMTP_PPP_PRODUCTNAME: read-only access to the product name SMTP_PPP_PRODUCTVERSION: read-only access to the product version SMTP_PPP_INSTANCENAME: read-only access to the server instance name - The service.listenaddr parameter prevents
Sendmail from listening to the localhost
SMTP socket. (382098)
This issue has to do with the Sendmail emulator, which redirects the SMTP connections to the MTA from the standard connection. The following parameters can be set to solve this problem:
local.service.sendmail.port
local.service.sendmail.listenaddrIf you set the local.service.sendmail.listenaddr, which is the IP address to listen on, the you should also set the local.service.sendmail.port
For the port number, sendmail looks first for the value defined by local.service.sendmail.port (for example, 25). If this is not set, then it looks for the value defined by service.smtp.port, then for the smtp/tcp port number. If none of these is set, it defaults to 25.
To find the listen address, sendmail looks first for the value defined by the local.service.sendmail.listenaddr parameter (for example, localhost). If this is not set, then it looks for the value defined by service.listenaddr. If neither is set, then it defaults to localhost.
- The MTA can leave deferred message bodies in the
messages directory without references to the original
messages. (382456)
Due to a race condition, deferred message bodies could be left in the messages directory without references to the original. This problem is fixed, and a configuration parameter is also available for tuning this.
The service.smtp.fileretry parameter is used to specify the number of times to retry internal renaming of a file before concluding an error exists. There is no default value; the internal value is 30.
- In Messenger Express, a "File too large" message may
appear after a large file is uploaded. (382477)
The service.http.maxpostsize parameter defines the maximum size of an HTTP POST that the server will attempt to upload.
If the file to be uploaded is larger than the value defined by service.http.maxpostsize, Messenger Express will upload at most 32K before returning the File too large error message.
- Turning off the MTA's DNS cache.
DNS caching by the MTA can be turned off if you wish to have more control over the DNS behavior. To turn off the MTA's DNS cache, set the service.smtp.dnscachesize parameter to -1.
An entry in the log will show that the DNS cache was disabled.
- Skipping the LDAP query in the MTA
(useful for out-going mail relays). (379424)
To skip the LDAP query in the MTA, you can set the service.smtp.smtp-router.remotemaildomains parameter. For example, setting it to *.siroe.com makes the server treat <everything>.siroe.com as remote and skip the LDAP lookup on them. Setting the service.smtp.smtp-router.remotemaildomains parameter to an asterisk (*) character makes the server treat everything as remote.
Any regular expresion can be used to set this parameter; for example, you could set the value to (*.siroe.com && *.company22.com) to make these addresses remote.
- Fallback host for the MTA. (379426)
To define a "host of last resort" for the MTA, set the service.smtp.smtp-deliver.fallbackhosts to a list of x:y separated by $ as the delimiter. x represents the pseudo-regular expression specifying the domain and y represents the host name or IP address.
If y has multiple IP addresses, they are treated as the lowest priority MXs by the name server. If the "real" MXs for the domain are dead, then these pseudo MX IP addresses float to the top and stay there for the duration of the TTL.
If you set this parameter to *.<host>, then all deferred mail is forwarded to <host>.