Blog - The mailbag

Announcing our fork of MailScanner - Baruwa-Scanner

July 28, 2016 at 12:00 PM | categories: Baruwa Enterprise, Baruwa, Baruwa 2.0, Baruwa-Scanner

I am pleased to announce that we have started work on Baruwa-Scanner a fork of the venerable MailScanner which is a core component of our Enterprise Edition offering.

Baruwa-Scanner is forked from the 4.x.x branch of MailScanner and is licensed under the GPLv3+.

Motivation

Baruwa started life as a front end for MailScanner and grew into a fully fledged Mail Security offering. Given its roots there are parts that are abit rough around the edges as it had to be moulded around the MailScanner architecture and inner working. This has a few disadvantages as there are restrictions to innovation going forward.

MailScanner is considered a mature product so not many changes/features are being introduced.

We are already working on a new mail content filtering solution named Incwadi that is due for introduction in our BaruwaOS 7 release. In the lead up to the introduction of Incwadi we decided to back port some of the improvements to our current BaruwaOS 6 product line thus the birth of Baruwa-Scanner.

Goals

Code clean up
Speed improvements
Memory usage optimization
Alignment to BaruwaOS

Code clean up

Baruwa-Scanner will remove all the old legacy code that is no longer relevant or optimal in the current era. The cleanup also removes all the non linux code such that the workarounds for BSD, Solaris and others.

Speed improvements

We intend on rewriting large portions of the code base to improve mail processing speed as well as reducing the resource usage.

Memory usage optimization

The rewrite will also work towards reducing and optimising the memory usage of the software.

Alignment to BaruwaOS

Baruwa-Scanner will be geared to being a first class citizen of the BaruwaOS ecosystem. This means any code that is not relevant for BaruwaOS will be removed. The feature set will also be geared towards tight integration with BaruwaOS.