Re: The state of maia in 2025

Hi Derek,

I agree about EFA, as an all in one solution. I like that maia can be
divided into separate machines - db server, web server, smtp server, etc to
scale as needed.

I would look into the maia code to fix it for php 8, but all the libraries
it depends on are rotting as well, so I'm not sure.

If I get a lot of spare time some day, I can look at what
specifically needs to be done, and go from there.

Joe





On Tue, Sep 2, 2025 at 4:02 PM Derek Atkins <[email protected]> wrote:

> I'll add that I, too, have not found a good alternative.
> I started looking into EFA, but it was a bit too integrated for my taste.
> I like the simplicity of Maia.
>
> For now I've just halted my system to keep it on PHP7.  The server is a
> dedicated mail server..
>
> I'd love to see something that allows future-proofing, but I'm definitely
> not an expert.
>
> I'd certainly be willing to bring the code into something like Cursor-AI
> and asking the AI to upgrade the platform to modern PHP.  But of course,
> who knows if that would work?  I've had mixed results.
>
> -derek
>
> On Tue, September 2, 2025 6:40 pm, Janky Jay, III wrote:
> > 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
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Maia-users mailing list
> > [email protected]
> > http://www.renaissoft.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/maia-users
> >
>
>
> --
>        Derek Atkins                 617-623-3745
>        [email protected]             www.ihtfp.com
>        Computer and Internet Security Consultant
>
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