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Spammail re-appears after update 3.0.0.14 (updated from 3.0.0.10)

Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2016 10:39 pm
by PSchoon
Hello,

We were very satisfied with the result of Mailwasher concerning the amount of spam it blocked up till the former software version (3.0.0.10).
However, after installing the latest version of the server edition (3.0.0.14) we receive a lot of spam messages again which were blocked in the former version.

Has there been a change in the way it examines the spam-messages?

Because we did not change any setting, we just ran the update software.

Thank you for a quick reply.

Re: Spammail re-appears after update 3.0.0.14 (updated from 3.0.0.10)

Posted: Fri Dec 09, 2016 7:05 am
by nick.bolton
Hi,

Actually nothing has changed in that regard. Here's the list of changes

• Accumulation of fixes for 3.0.0.10 to 3.0.0.14
• [Feature] Enhanced performance for processing and delivering emails by blocking spammy connections to avoid throttling.
• [Fix] Fix for crash when 2 identical emails arrive at the same time and one is already in cache.
• [Fix] Fix for update notificaton not working.
• [Fix] Updated regular expression engine from http://www.regexlab.com/en/regref.htm so all these reg exp commands will work now.
• [Fix] Fix for housekeeping only keeping 7 days of emails.
• [Fix] Fix for MS Exchange when it sends undocumented SMTP commands.
• [Fix] Moved licensing back to a 30 day trial model.
• Miscellaneous fixes

Actually, the thing that might have changed for you is that for about 6 months we ran MWES as a freemium product to see if it would increase sales. It would still block spam for all time but you could pay for extra features. With 3.0.0.14 we went back to the 30 day trial model so after 30 days it would let the spam back through if you didn't have a license. If you don't have a license then this is probably the issue. Happy to extend a license for 6 months since this is probably a bit of a shock.

Re: Spammail re-appears after update 3.0.0.14 (updated from 3.0.0.10)

Posted: Fri Dec 09, 2016 8:15 pm
by PSchoon
That's strange, because we've purchased the license and we are running the full paid version. And still we are having this problem of certain spam getting through. It's not that ALL spam gets through now, but only specific mails which were blocked in the former version right away, but now, after the update they slip through and we are getting them in our mailboxes....

We haven't had that issue with the 3.0.0.10 version. Just as soon as we installed the upgrade to 3.0.0.14 this started to occur.

I've also made some custom filters that used to work, but now in this new version, they do not work anymore.
That is very strange!

I can still see all the filters I made and I can also edit them, but they do not work in the way that they used to do.

Re: Spammail re-appears after update 3.0.0.14 (updated from 3.0.0.10)

Posted: Fri Dec 09, 2016 9:51 pm
by nick.bolton
Ok, can you show me an example of a filter and an email which gets through? We did update the custom filters to use a new regular expression engine but it's backward compatible.

Re: Spammail re-appears after update 3.0.0.14 (updated from 3.0.0.10)

Posted: Fri Dec 09, 2016 10:41 pm
by PSchoon
Please find the example in the attachment.

Re: Spammail re-appears after update 3.0.0.14 (updated from 3.0.0.10)

Posted: Sat Dec 10, 2016 4:43 am
by nick.bolton
Thanks, can you copy/paste that phrase in here as plain text so I have it exactly and we'll try and test it here.

Re: Spammail re-appears after update 3.0.0.14 (updated from 3.0.0.10)

Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2016 8:09 pm
by PSchoon
Here is the phrase:

Lönen ligger på

Regards

Re: Spammail re-appears after update 3.0.0.14 (updated from 3.0.0.10)

Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2016 8:33 pm
by nick.bolton
Thanks, some quick testing tells me that that phrase doesn't get stopped by the filter, but plain ascii characters are stopped, further testing reveals letters ö and å are causing the issue. I'll get the developers to have a look and fix it.

Re: Spammail re-appears after update 3.0.0.14 (updated from 3.0.0.10)

Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2016 9:18 pm
by PSchoon
OK! That explains something.
I see in the dashboard figures that the custom filters haven't been applied since the last update and we have some more filters with 'strange' ascii characters. So I think that is the reason for the spam re-appearing.
Hopefully the problem will be fixed very soon.

Regards

Re: Spammail re-appears after update 3.0.0.14 (updated from 3.0.0.10)

Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2016 4:26 am
by nick.bolton
Hi. This is strange, because we tried this in old versions and it doesn't work there either as far as we can tell from our testing.
For now, you could change the filter to a regular expression filter with the phrase L*nen ligger p* as that matches - until we work out a fix

Re: Spammail re-appears after update 3.0.0.14 (updated from 3.0.0.10)

Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2016 9:26 pm
by PSchoon
What I find strange is that some similar mails with exact the same content in the e-mail body were successfully blocked by the first alert, or RBL.
So it is not consistent in the way it handles the spam messages. This is very weird....
I've now amended the filter to the regular expression. So let's see what happens now.

Re: Spammail re-appears after update 3.0.0.14 (updated from 3.0.0.10)

Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2016 10:28 pm
by nick.bolton
First-Alert and RBL's use different methods to catch spam. RBL's look at the IP address it came from, and since spammers send spam via many thousands of compromised machines then some IP addresses will be caught and others won't. First-Alert matches exact spam emails with some allowance for variation, but if the email is too varied then it might not match it.