What's new

This release introduces connection pooling (reuse), a more powerful queue query API and a new on-disk queue format. Please see the changelog for a full list of changes, and the release blog for more information.

Upgrade notes

The queue is upgraded to the new "HQF" format. The upgrade process may take longer than usual, as the queue data is migrated to the new format. Depending on queue/quarantine size, disk performance and RAM, the upgrade takes anything from minutes to hours. It's recommended to have at least a few gigabytes of free space on the storage partition. Since this is a critical one-way operation, it's highly recommended to shutdown the system (to have the system in a known state) and take a snapshot, if possible.

Important changes

• The SOAP API that was deprecated in 5.0 has been removed. Please use the REST and Protocol Buffers API instead.
• The GetMailQueueMetric() function that was deprecated in 5.2 has been removed in favour for the new queue_quota() function. The old function exists but returns zero in 5.3, so existing code doesn't need to be removed prior to the update. After the update, new messages should be queued with appropriate queue quota IDs, corresponding to the queue_quota() checks you do. Messages queued before the update will not count towards the quota.
• The REST API's /email/queue/,  /hsl/rates, /hsl/cache/ and /process/ have been removed in favour for the new Protocol Buffers API.
• The log format has changed since smtpd and queued has been merged into one program.

New recommendations

We recommend that following changes are performed in order to prepare for future deprecations.

• The pre- and post-delivery functions PickupPolicy() and PickupSuspend() are renamed to queue_policy() and queue_suspend() since they now work in any script hook.

Changelog

This is a list of notable changes, in addition to the ones mentioned above.

Added

• Queue and delivery
  • Connection pooling (reuse)
  • Fine-grained queue query API (for list, update and distribution)
  • Delivery settings for active queue fields
  • Active queue suspend and policy functions in more script hooks
• SMTP server scripting
  • New timestamp, expiration and identity options to the signDKIM functions
  • New signature_exclude option to ScanCLAM
• Script language
  • New Iconv() class for internationalization conversion
  • The array_every() function to test all element against callback
  • The message size including modifications in the pre- and post-delivery script
  • Added Base64 encoding option to the MIME set/addHeader functions
• Web administration
  • New queue message viewer that merges open connections for better overview
  • Powerful filter dialogue using the new queue conditions
  • Column selector and inline messages preview in message viewer
•  Other
  • Command-line interface called halonctl
  • Idle timeout to virtual servers
  • Graceful draining to the background http() process httprd

Changed

• New on-disk queue format
• Improved queue quota functionality
• Re-implemented barrier using shared memory functions
• Certificate can be in reloadable configuration even if private key is in startup

Integrated package

• Upgraded to FreeBSD 12.1 (p1)
• Updated to the latest FreeBSD 12 quarterly packages
• Patched Net-SNMP to fix memory leak