Logging to a Database

[indesignfirm]

First off, I LOVE MAGICSPAM. It's cut our spam so much, it's just crazy.

As you know, adding a product that may reject someones email, eventually catches someone who didn't have their mail server setup right. Our customers, don't care if their friends mail server is on 6 blacklists, sending emails from a dynamic IP, and has incorrect reverse DNS. They just want the email from their friend.

With that said,

Is it at all possible to have MagicSpam log to the database. We constantly get phone calls from customers who have had an email blocked. We would love for their to be a way for us to search the logs from our own internal systems instead of someone having to have admin access to the server.

This way we could maybe even show our customers how much mail was blocked to their specific email or even allow them to search the reason why their friends email was blocked.

Thanks

[magicspam]

We are happy to hear that MagicSpam has been effective in reducing your server Spam intake. We certainly do agree that when profiling remote servers at the SMTP level, it does indeed flush out those cases of misconfigured servers and IP addresses - which is sad considering such standards have been in place for well over 8 years now...

As to database logging. We appreciate any/all feedback and agree that it would be useful to have log searching capabilities without requiring administrative access. This is an item we will need to discuss with the development team for possible solutions. As to logging to the database however, such an approach would not truly by feasible. From practical experience with design and engineering with our flagship product MagicMail (which utilizes the MagicSpam core spam rules plus many additional features) there is a direct correlation of system performance degradation when interacting with database queries on each connection. The performance degradation is indeed high enough to have prompted us to reject said methodology.

This does not however stop you from 'archiving' log entries to database yourself either via scripts or some other mechanism. The log files themselves are located in /var/log/magicspam and follow the format of log.nn where 'nn' is the day of the week (0=sunday... 6=saturday). Our upcoming release of MagicSpam modifies this logging behavior to follow a more traditional syslog style logging structure.

And of course, if you would like assistance with setting such a system up, you can always feel free to contact our sales department for quotes on having our support and development team implement such a script / system for you.

For the mean time, the topic of non administrative log search has been raised as a feature request with our development team.

Thank you!

[indesignfirm]

Thanks for the information. We'll just write a script and cron it to pick up the entries on a regular basis. Any idea when we should be prepared for the new version, and what is the format? Will the information format be the same, and the log file names will just be different, or will the file format be different as well?

Thanks... Again, we love it!

[magicspam]

We expect to be releasing the new release within the next couple of weeks. The log format itself does not change, just the log naming convention. New features in this release include some additional locale support as well as configurable 'log history' (ie: number of days of back logs to keep on server).

Keep posted on the 'news and announcements' forum for when the release is available for download (or subscribe to the RSS feed).