BARIS has had a number of alterations to it, although its role is still entirely e-mail related.

• In February, 2005, we migrated Mailman mailing lists to BARIS, upgrading the version of Mailman in the process and introducing searchable archives for all mailing lists.

• At the same time we migrated Mailman, we added LDAP mail routing functionality, moving all mailing list aliases into LDAP, where KE reads them every hour and BARIS and TAIKA access them immediately. New and deleted Mailman lists are also updated every hour.

• BARIS is currently running SquirrelMail version 1.4.4.

BARIS is being a test case for a new sednmail milter: milter-sender.

The new filter performs a reverse check on the sending address’s primary mail server to verify that the sending address is legitimate and that the domain is willing to accept return mail. No actual return mail is sent, however if the tests fail then the incoming message is rejected. Other sanity checks are also performed. The primary result of this filter ought to be a decrease in the amount of spam coming from fake addresses, primarily at large domains such as Hotmail and Yahoo!. While most of this could be done in MIMEDefang, having a separate milter with this as its single function decreases complexity of the individual pieces. If testing procedes favorably on BARIS, we should be able to install this filter on KE as well.

Update: This milter does actually send a return message, contrary to the implications on the author’s web site (it is never stated that it doesn’t send this message, it is just somewhat implied). It also is not stable on BARIS, dying after a few days and unable to restart. For these reasons we won’t be using this milter.

BARIS is now a mail exchanger for the earlham.edu domain.

BARIS is running Sendmail 8.12.10 with the same MIMEDefang milter as KE. With this, we should be able to both host a mail exchanger and have it run extremely strict spam and virus checks at the same time. Unlike KE, BARIS is running the open source ClamAV antivirus program. As this program is able to run in a daemon mode, it is scanning for viruses much more quickly than Vexira on KE.

BARIS is also set up to use STARTTLS and AUTH, allowing it to be used as a secure mail relay for mail clients. Like KE, it is accessible on both the standard SMTP port (25) and the submission port (587), with the latter requiring authentication.

Monday, January 5, we switched WebMail services to a new server.

This new server is dedicated to running the WebMail interface, taking the load of this off of KE, the e-mail content server. E-mail remains stored on KE, but WebMail access is now handled by BARIS.