I'm pleased to announce the release of Smail 3.2.0.117. Smail is a more-or-less sendmail-compatible e-mail transport and relay implementation for Unix-like (POSIX compatible) systems, but it has much cleaner and hopefully more human friendly configuration style than sendmail does, and for many uses it should even run right out-of-the-box with little or no customisation. This BETA (and major release candidate) release of Smail cleans up some issues with the previous release and adds a few important new features. The most important bug fix is one I'm not even exactly sure how to reproduct, but it was causing a certain client-SMTP to always encounter a crash. Other important bug fixes previously mentioned on the smail3-users list have also been incorporated of course. The most important of the new features improvements to the old host domain regular expression lists. These now support the same matched sub-string substitution features as the full-featured PCRE lists. Improvements in parsing of host domain regular expressions also now allow double-backslash escaped field separators (the full-featured PCRE lists introduced in 3.1.0.116 supported this feature from their beginning though it was not documented). This way of doing it is a little bit un-intuitive, but necessary because the initial handling of backslash escapes is done when the config entries are first read, and so a backslash has to be inserted into the string value in order to be seen by the list parser. However since the same must be done to get backslashes through to the RE engine it should be a familiar problem to users of similar syntax schemes (e.g. C and related language compilers, as well as most modern lisp readers, usually do their own backslash escape parsing and so use of backslashes in REs in those languages also requires escaping the backslashes with themselves to get one past the first parser). Only AWK and shell and similar languages which either always use separate quoting mechanisms for REs and string values, or which simply don't implement any character escapes in their string values, get away without having to use double-backslashes. A new variable "smtp_mua_only_hosts" has been added to assist with controlling the behaviour of message submission clients. Clients connecting from addresses in this list are not permitted to send bounce messages. This eliminates the fallout from ignorant end users using poorly designed software which fakes bounces of spam and the like. Unfortunately it also blocks legitimate message disposition notifications (RFC 3798 MDN), though in my considered opinion MDNs are a bad idea in the first place anyway. BTW, if I catch anyone ever using this feature to block the null sender path on a public SMTP server their address will immediately be submitted to RFC-ignorant.org's DSN list and I would encourage everyone else to make similar submissions if they find this happening. I also hope everyone will use the dsn.rfc-ignorant.org DNS blacklist to block such idiots until they come to their senses and start accepting bounce messages again. I finally got annoyed enough with the multiple HELO/EHLO warning and reject logs generated by clients trying HELO after a failed EHLO (just as Smail itself does of course), that I implemented some rudimentary duplicate error suppression specific to the greeting command. This really helped my own little tiny home machine where I was seeing upwards of 350,000 "duplicated" log entries every day in recent months. :-) The "logsumm" output has also been improved considerably. Various other minor bugs and some mis-features that were reported since the last release have also been worked on in hopes they've been ironed out sufficiently. There's one more known problem with the "mkline" utility but it'll have to wait. There are of course also some feature requests that haven't been worked on yet either. A full ChangeLog of all CVS commit messages since the 3.2.0.116 release is included in the distribution for your entertainment and amazement. :-) The best way to find out just the user-visible changes in this or any other release might be to read the CHANGES file from the version you're using now and then read the new CHANGES file and see what's different (an actual "diff", even with '-b', may not work very well because of paragraph re-formatting, but it may give you a head start on where to actually read for the differences). You should also build the new version and then dump the full run-time configuration from it and compare that to your existing installation's configuration. (i.e. run "src/smail -v -bP all") If you're upgrading a pre-3.2.0.116 installation you may want to flush your input queue and clean out your error queue before installing. This is because the per-message log format changed in the previous release. The old format won't break anything, though bounce messages from any eventually undeliverable old messages may not include all the right details. As always be very careful to test the new release in your environment before committing to it! Once again this release has been very carefully and extensively tested in a variety of busy environments. It is expected that with only minor fixes and portability adjustments it will very soon become the next new full official release (which will be known as 3.3). However more testing and experience in different environments is always welcome, so if you can possibly install and use this beta release and report your results then that will help us make an even better official release. One thing's for certain, the release process is getting easier (see the mkRelease.sh script), and of course it's always less arduous the less there is that has changed since the last release, so provided there's new code to release, releases of some sort will hopefully be more frequent in the future. Note for users of pkgsrc/ports/openpkg style systems: There's a pkgsrc module for the latest available here: ftp://ftp.weird.com/pub/local/smail/smail-pkgsrc.shar ftp://ftp.planix.com/pub/Smail/smail-pkgsrc.shar It will be udated to include any critical bug fix patches if and when necessary -- i.e. before a proper release including the same fixes is available. Watch the smail3-users list for notices about such updates. As always the ToDo and PROJECTS files list an ever-growing number of things that various people think should be worked on. Patches that eliminate items from these files are always welcome! If you would like to work on any of the bigger projects just send a note to the developers at and let us know so we can help co-ordinate. See the README and the file Smail3-devel for more information. If you need help with configuration issues, or you'd like to discuss some feature or bug, etc., please subscribe to the Smail-3 User's Mailing list . To subscribe to this list send your request to . Note I do not have any direct connection with this list, other than the fact that I maintain the software discussed on it. See the README file for more information. Remember to use the "smailbug" utility to submit patches, change requests, bug reports and other stuff that needs to be recorded so it won't get lost or forgotten! (There's now a symlink installed in the smail_bin_dir to make it easier to access this script, and of course there's a manual page for it too.) For further information please visit the Smail world-wide web page: