ASK Version 2.4.0 Released

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Ladies and Gentlemen,

After a long time, ASK 2.4.0 stable is finally out.

This version includes a huge number of new features and bugfixes. We
recommend all users of ASK 2.2 to upgrade to 2.4.0.

The changes in this version (since 2.2) are:

- Removed examples from the sample lists. A lot of people were having
  problems with their MUAs reformatting the examples in weird ways.

- RPM now includes the manpages.

- Renamed confirmlist.txt to .ask-loop-control.dat. The name confirmlist.txt
  seems to imply this file is yet another list, when it is not.

- Removed a nasty bug with cyclic references that caused temporary files to
  be left behind in some cases (again, our thanks to Nils Weisensee).

- Added Danish translations of confirmation and blacklist messages.

- Character set of confirmation messages is now iso-8859-1 instead of unkno=
wn.

- Reformatted sample whitelist, blacklist and ignorelist to not exceed
  70 columns.

- Added exception handling.

- Found a bug in Python <2.2. This is now the minimum recommended version.
  (thanks to Nils Weisensee for spotting this hard to trace bug).

- bugfix: Some messages without the sender's username caused a traceback.

- Messages from mailer-daemon, remote commands and confirmation returns will
  not be matched in the whitelist anymore.

- bugfix: Messages from whitelisted people that look like a confirmation re=
turn
  will not be blindly delivered.

- The list matching routines will specifically ignore any matches that also=
=20
  match one of our email addresses ("from re" only).

- Added the "header re" qualifier in the regular expression to match any he=
ader.

- Lots of bugfixes on the Makefile and .spec. RPMs should be correct now.

- bugfix: empty regexp would match everything

- bugfix: ASK EDIT {WHITE|IGNORE|BLACK}LIST would cause a traceback.=20

- Some typos fixed.

- White/Ignore and Blacklists can be spread over multiple files. Only the
  first one will be written to by ASK but all will be used to match. The sa=
mple
  config file also includes a "-local" version of each list file suitable f=
or
  local editing (prevents conflicts).

- Regular expressions are "escaped" before being added to the whitelist.=20
  If something like "[email protected]" is added, it will be converted
  to "paganini@paganini\.net"

- X-Primary-Address takes precedence over all other headers when checking f=
or
  the sender's address (as suggested by Jason Mastaler). It is *not* used to
  send back any messages (nastygrams/confirmations).

- The "Resent-From" field now takes precedence over Reply-To: and From:

- Queue listing is now reverse-sorted by file modification time.

- Confirmations will cause both the sender in the confirmation *and* the
  sender in the queued message to be added to the whitelist.

- Regular expression match: From/To in the lists will match in a slightly
  different way. Things like foo@bar (looking like a complete email) will
  be translated internally into "^foo@bar" (to avoid oo@bar from matching
  as foo@bar). All the rest is left intact (so, for instance, @bar will
  match anything having @bar anywhere in the string).

- Whitelist is checked before blacklist and ignorelist. This allows people
  to ignore an entire domain while allowing access to certain people from
  that domain, for instance (always make sure you never have your email in
  any of your lists).

- Senders will not be added to the lists if they are already there.

- Fixed bug that prevented Eudora from working correctly with the "mailto:"
  links (Eudora dislikes single quotes).

- Bulk/Junk have been removed from the sample configuration file.

- Messages can now be saved in "IMAP" format. Many thanks to Dan Pewzner for
  this brilliant idea and sponsorship.

- distutils installation has been phased out. A new Makefile has been added=
 to
  create the RPM and TAR files (soon, .DEB)

- Heavy remodeling in the remote commands code. Lots of small bugs ironed o=
ut.

- Quotes are now allowed in the configuration files.

- List edits will handle quoting properly

- X-ASK-Info now shows the "approving" whitelist line, if that's the case.

- Support for the "*_mailbody.txt" files is slowly being phased out

- Finnish Translation Added (thanks to Reijo Korhonen)

- A space between the "mailto:" and the real email address was confusing so=
me
  browsers. Fixed.

- A timestamp is automatically appended to all X-ASK-Info headers.

- Junk/Bulk messages are now queued with the appropriate warning in the
  X-ASK-Info header.

We hope the extensive list of fixes and new features is worth the long
wait.

Happy Spam Killing
Paga

--=20
Marco Paganini          | UNIX / Linux / Networking
[email protected]   | PGP: http://www.paganini.net/pgp/
http://www.paganini.net | Magnus Frater te spectat...

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