Far be it for me to halt progress...
Scott, I can't wait to put in the new TESTSFAILED logic. I've wanted
exactly this to keep certain multi-answer ip4r tests in check, and Matt is
off to a great start in combining tests...
I also find that CMDSPACE is very handy and has low false positives.
Seamless decoding of BASE64 Subjects (and quoted printables?) is also a good
thing(tm).
SPF testing and the time-based DOW and HOUR features could be very handy.
But for my two cents, I have other priorities:
Priority #1 (by far)
====================
I want cleaner logs. This has been discussed in the list before, and I'm
pretty sure that Pete and Sandy agreed that they'd seen the behaviour
elsewhere, i.e. that multiple processes of writing to the same log file are
garbling the text file, and that per se, the garbling wasn't strictly
declude's doing.
I find that I need to run at loglevel HIGH to get the reporting I need on
text filtering, which means bigger log files and presumably more time spent
by each instance of declude while it or Windows races to the end of the file
to append the text.
Without good logging, I'm very much put off my log analysis. Filtering the
logs when I get a false positive during my mailserver's "morning rush" is a
major pain due to all the overlapping loglines.
I can think of a couple of techniques, and I'm a lousy programmer. I don't
think you'll need my help there...
The simplest thing might be to give us a variable in the global.cfg to turn
on file locking, so that we can control whether the performance hit is
important in our environment. I realize that would likely add a lot of
lines of code to your source, but it could also be trivial to implement
inside a function.
Sending to a syslog server might also be easy to implement, but the only
experience I have with using the logs in a resulting syslog server is with
Kiwi, and there, I was using the text log it creates rather than any kind of
interface to syslog (I don't know if that's the norm, nor what the IMail
users with syslog do with their logging.)
Ideally, the logs would be sent directly by declude.exe to an ODBC DSN and
the particular SQL database of our choosing, but I know that's really a
stretch.
Priority #2
===========
I get pecked to death by ducks on the small-weight false positives I get on
short text matches that are matching the encoded body of BASE64 attachments.
I know that you've mentioned several times before that going beyond the
current functionality would require a big leap in going to full MIME
decoding, but I hope that my aim is lower: I want to skip matching the
BASE64 encoding.
Sure, it would also be great to skip decoding MIME attachments that aren't
text or HTML (I get false positives on the binary contents of decoded .zip
files, too), but that would probably be Priority #3.
I know that at least one person on the list relies on declude to match text
inside the BASE64 attachments to catch viruses, but perhaps matching that
could be toggled with a flag, or make it a new test, e.g. instead of
specifying
BODY x CONTAINS abcdefghij
that this would be appropriate:
BASE64CODE x CONTAINS s9Zci6Y4
I haven't thought through all the ways in which a decoder would be useful,
so that exact testname might not be appropriate, but hey, it's a start.
Thanks for reading this all the way through,
Andrew 8)
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