Re: The Maia 2.0 Wishlist/Brainstorming Thread

Agreed, maia is already fairly modular, Sure, it can all be installed on a
single OS instance, as I have done for small businesses. But at Toyota, we
had internet facing MX servers, and maia servers, and a dedicated
database server. I've also deployed the web interface on a dedicated box,
back when we hadn't gotten it working with php 7, and you could even run a
dedicated clamd instance, accessed via tcp. It can all be nicely dockerized
as well, though I prefer real system containers, like openvz.

Jake




On Wed, Apr 15, 2020 at 7:28 AM Robert LeBlanc <[email protected]> wrote:

> Thanks Pete—a little bit of “how” isn’t a bad thing :)
>
> Agreed about the spam/junk folder mechanism, or more generally the notion
> of writing lightweight add-ons/plug-ins for popular mail clients that
> interact with Maia via API calls (e.g. REST web services, etc.).  This was
> on our long-term blueprint for Maia all along, we just never got to it :)
>
> A robust and well-documented API for Maia seems like a given, both for
> internal (e.g. library, module, extension, etc.) and external (i.e. web
> services) use.  That should, as you say, encourage other developers to
> craft their own front-ends for Maia, or integrate Maia into their own
> solutions, write third-party extensions for Maia, etc.  This would also
> make Maia more platform-agnostic, in that tools that interact with Maia
> could be written in any programming language and run on any operating
> system, as long as they use Maia’s API calls.
>
> We did separate Maia out into MVC-style components when we moved to
> templating (i.e. Smarty), in the hope that third parties would design their
> own themes and front-ends, but I can’t say that we got much engagement from
> the user base on that front.  We provided a couple of very basic, ugly
> themes (hey, we were back-end devs, not artists!) to serve as templates for
> people to modify, but despite holding a couple of contests we never
> received any third-party submissions.  It turns out that companies that
> design their own themes don’t want to (or aren’t allowed to) share them, so
> if anyone made any non-trivial modifications to the stock themes I never
> got to see any.  If you know a good UI/UX designer, though… :)
>
> On Apr 14, 2020, at 9:45 PM, Pete <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> 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 <
> lmulder-iL7gtBVyNKCGUxFv0Br65wC/[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:* lmulder-iL7gtBVyNKCGUxFv0Br65wC/[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 <lmulder-iL7gtBVyNKCGUxFv0Br65wC/[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
> lmulder-iL7gtBVyNKCGUxFv0Br65wC/[email protected]
> http://www.informability.com/about
> https://www.facebook.com/informability
> Ph: 630-532-5941 <6305325941>
> Fx: 630-532-5955 <6305325955>
> ________________________________________________
>
>
> *From:* [email protected]
> *Sent:* April 14, 2020 9:11 PM
> *To:* lmulder-iL7gtBVyNKCGUxFv0Br65wC/[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.
>
>
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