MailScanner Removed

January 5, 2008

In addition to the enormous mail backlog that landed on our doorstep last week, we simultaneously hit an additional snag: An update of perl to v5.8.8 broke MailScanner and could not be fixed without a major operating system upgrade. But the operating system upgrade cannot be undertaken with MailScanner installed - Catch 22 (documentation on this issue is here). As a result, we had an enormous backlog of mail that simply couldn’t be released quickly.

The likelihood of these two events happening simultaneously is like lightning hitting twice in the same spot. Guess we’re just lucky :).

MailScanner has been removed from Birdhouse and replaced with the original (and more straightforward) cPanel + SpamAssassin system. This change will result in both lighter loads and easier troubleshooting of our mail system in the event of any future problems.

When MailScanner was first installed, it offered a lot of functionality not offered by cPanel + SpamAssassin alone. But with the move to cPanel 11, enough new features have been added that we no longer need MailScanner. Removing MailScanner also clears the path for us to move from the current operating system to CentOS 4.x in the near future.