Re: The Maia 2.0 Wishlist/Brainstorming Thread

I'm really excited to see work starting to move forward on a possible 2.0!

Along with the caching and individual whitelists/blacklists, it seems most customers expect to be able to interact with their spam filter on a basic level with a folder.  This kinda goes along with the caching idea, but makes it available in the client.  An obvious spam message should be able to be moved from Inbox to SPAM folder and be blocked on future attempts. In the same thread, checking a spam folder and moving something to inbox should whitelist things.  This is much easier to do if you own the whole stack but you said it's a wish list so I'll add it.  In this case, you'd need some hooks to copy mail from quarantine to SPAM and update on user actions on those items. I've not really looked into this so bear with me.

If you go with a SPAM folder, it takes care of the caching as well, the trailing 30-60 days of spam are right there in the client in whatever way you use your email.

To go along with that, I'd prefer that Maia2 gets split into front and back ends with an API between.  This makes things much more maintainable and allows us or other projects to ingest maia backend to be part of a full client, with the fallback being interaction through a spam folder.  With Maia2 server running as a milter, any web client could make a basic white/black list page and update that database.  Those projects might even maintain that in their project language which seems much harder than the basic spam/ham work which doesn't change nearly as much.  While the spam/ham work doesn't change much, the expertise for building a milter is a more specialized skill while building the web interfacecan be done in many ways and languages.  Web design is also a skill that is much more widely available than mail server admin.  I see this as a key to project sustainability going forward.

This split also allows the basic filtering to be done in the phase one, and the web client to be done on a separate time frame, or even with help from some of the other projects that already have the website built out and would just need to add a black/whitelist page and a quarantine viewer.

As for tools, python/flask seems to be the sensible choice of language for a back end.  It would be nice to abstract the database calls as well so people can use the DB of their choice.  With a basic, get record, put record, upsert, delete before a database write, it would be super simple to add or swap later.  Mongo should work as it's good for read heavy applications, though in a perfect world, you could swap in any key/value or relational database either cloud or local.  For a single local DB solution, PostgreSQL has both a standard relational database and key/value setup in a single install.

I realize you don't really want to talk about how, right now, but as a Systems Admin, how is also what for me.

--

Pete

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Tuesday, April 14, 2020 8:05 PM, Lawrence Mulder <[email protected]> wrote:

> Robert,
>
> Yes, but more or less an easier way to manage a user that ends up with thousands of entries in their w/b list.  So a search or a way to remove many entries without having to toggle them to 'remove' one at a time in the GUI.
>
> Thanks
> -Larry
>
> From: [email protected]
> Sent: April 14, 2020 9:43 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Cc: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [Maia-users] The Maia 2.0 Wishlist/Brainstorming Thread
> Yes, addressing the “auto-confirm” thresholds in  process-quarantine.pl was just a kludge—a quick and easy way to add a much-requested feature without having to redesign a big chunk of code.  I agree that it should be part of each user’s individual settings.
>
> As for the whitelist/blacklist maintenance, you’re asking for a toggle that would switch everything from white to black (and vice-versa)?
>
>> On Apr 14, 2020, at 7:19 PM, Lawrence Mulder <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Robert,
>>
>> Thank you for your reply and for bringing your expertise back to the fore.
>>
>> I guess that helps on number 3 but sounds like it could be done more flexibly such as per user in a new Maia?
>>
>> Also on number 4 - you are correct about spam lists, I was thinking about the whitelist/blacklist maintenance.
>>
>> Cheers.
>> -Larry
>>
>> ________________________________________________
>>
>> Lawrence R. Mulder / RHCE, VTSP, SEC+
>> Vice President, InformAbility, Inc.
>> IT Consulting – On-Premise Systems - Cloud Systems
>> [email protected]
>> http://www.informability.com/about
>> https://www.facebook.com/informability
>> Ph: [630-532-5941](tel:6305325941)
>> Fx: [630-532-5955](tel:6305325955)
>> ________________________________________________
>>
>> From: [email protected]
>> Sent: April 14, 2020 9:11 PM
>> To: [email protected]
>> Cc: [email protected]
>> Subject: Re: [Maia-users] The Maia 2.0 Wishlist/Brainstorming Thread
>>
>> Thanks Larry!
>>
>> Just a couple of notes about (3) and (4), which are already in Maia 1.x.
>>
>> For (3), I remember we added “auto-confirm” thresholds for spam and ham at one point, but it wasn’t configurable from the web interface, it had to be configured (globally) in the configuration file for the process-quarantine.pl script (i.e. /etc/maia/maia.conf).  For instance:
>>
>> # If Bayes training is enabled, automatically learn items
>> # with extreme scores, even without user confirmation.
>> # Set these values conservatively, or undef to disable.
>>
>> $autolearn_ham_threshold = -5;
>> $autolearn_spam_threshold = 10;
>> $autoreport_spam_threshold = 15;
>>
>> As for (4), you can set all of the items on a given page to spam, non-spam, or delete just by selecting the column header.
>>
>>> 3. On the web interface, It would be nice to have the system "auto-process" messages above or below a certain score threshold.  Rarely would a "suspected spam" message with a score of 40 really need me to "rescue" it from spam.  So, if I could tell maia to auto process messages that were above a 15 (or whatever number works for my message patterns), it would make the volume of spam I had to look at and confirm via the website much lower.
>>>
>>> 4. Also on the web interface, it would be helpful to allow the ability to toggle the status of every page of emails to a different status instead of having to change each message from spam to ham and vice versa.  It doesn't happen that often, but if there is a misconfiguration or for some reason Maia quarantines a bunch of emails, being able to toggle all 'suspected SPAM' to "non-spam" all at once would be very helpful.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Maia-users mailing list
>> [email protected]
>> http://www.renaissoft.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/maia-users

_______________________________________________
Maia-users mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.renaissoft.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/maia-users