Re: The state of maia in 2025

Hello Joe,

On 9/2/25 04:06PM, jjs - mainphrame wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> As a long time maia user, I and some others did some work a few years 
> back to get  it working on php 7. But I'm watching with concern as php 
> 7 disappears from the landscape.
>
PHP 7.x (7.4 as the last) reached end-of-life over 3.5 years ago [0]. I 
would highly suggest updating for security reasons.

> I haven't seen anything that is quite as nice. I've looked at proxmox 
> mail gateway and other products, and am disappointed so far.
>
I've tried many other products as well while migrating away from 
Maia-Mailguard and the only one I did end up liking was Rspamd [1]. I 
use FreeBSD and wrote a guide for my setup [2] that you can likely 
follow using another OS/distribution of your choice.

> The back end still works, as does everything written in perl. The only 
> problem is the web interface and its dependence on legacy php.
>
This is true. Only the web UI front-end ran into trouble. Although, I 
suspect more Perl issues will continue to arise as Maia's Perl code is 
getting quite old now.

> I suppose that for now, I'll continue on with a special VM running php 
> 7 for the web interface, but it would be nice to know if anyone else 
> has been working on a php-8 friendly maia web interface.
>
I would again, highly suggest upgrading PHP to at least 8.2 to avoid 
security vulnerabilities [3] for the foreseeable future.

There was some work done a couple of forks [4][5] that did keep Perl 
code up-to-date and the web UI working into PHP 8.x. However, that also 
quickly halted when HTMLPurifier went silent upstream which Maia 
required. I haven't seen any additional work to remedy this problem. If 
I recall, there was also a hiccup with the latest version(s) of Smarty. 
Again, I haven't seen any additional work for this either.

I certainly hope you find a feasible replacement for Maia-Mailguard 
since the project appears to be all but dead and PHP 7.x is crazy 
dangerous to run these days especially if it's exposed to the public. 
Best of luck!

[0] https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php
[1] https://github.com/rspamd/rspamd
[2] https://www.purplehat.org/?page_id=1450
[3] https://security.snyk.io/package/linux/debian:11/php7.4
[4] https://github.com/technion/maia_mailguard
[5] https://github.com/einheit/maia_mailguard_1.05

Regards,
Janky Jay, III

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