Anyone know when smarter mail 6 will be available?

http://www.smartertools.com/landing/upcomingproducts/smartermail6.aspx

no, but I will definately be making the upgrade. Being able to grey list IPs by country is almost worth its weight in gold. They have some awesome Anti-Spam Improvements

I got SmarterMail 6 running on my Dedicated box. I have to say its awesome! It has a default list of RBLs, plus greylisting that has eliminated all my spam. It also seems to run much faster, and takes up less memory. SmarterTools did a great job on this product! Its worth the upgrade. Just a note you may have to run it in classic mode if you are using Windows Server 2008 / IIS 7. If everyone used this new smartermail, I think postini would be out of business.

That's good news. I can't wait until my shared plan has v6.

If you are on a shared plan some of the more advanced features ( RBL grey listing ) are only accessible from the Server Admin side. HMS in my experience does not enable these due to the additional processing power they require. Of course they get a kick back for their Postini, and if they offered the RBL and grey listing on shared plans, this would eliminate the need for Positini. Hopefully they will change their policy.

Keep in mind that we also now filter all incoming email with SpamAssassin on shared mail servers. You'll need to update your domain level spam filtering so it is a little more aggressive with things flagged by SpamAssassin.

Why don't you guys just use some RBL lists? I thought Spam Assassin is a memory hog, and kills the performance of the box. Correct me if I am wrong.

SpamAssassin runs on a cluster of servers by itself. That's true though, SpamAssassin on Windows is very resource intensive, but our implimentation for shared consists of two load balanced clusters of Linux servers running SpamAssassin. Once you get SA off of a SmarterMail server, the performance in checking mail against it increases exponentially.

good to know. I had a hard time believing you had SA running on every shared Mail Server. For people with a VPS or dedicated, the default RBL settings are very low memory intensive. It too bad HMS doesn't enable greylisting. Spammers don't like being told to come back in 5 minutes.

The problem with greylisting is that the '5 minute' rule you impose isn't necessarily 5 minutes - the inbound server simply says "try again later" and the sending server determines what 'later' is. In some cases sending servers can be configured so that 'later' is as much as an hour or two. A lot of our clients would be upset if we told them we were using anti-spam measures that result in that severe of a delay for their mail, and few if any would accept the explanation that it's not technically our fault the sending server is waiting too long to resend.

In fact, that is the problem with a lot of the inherent spam filtering seen in Smartermail - it's a serverwide setting and what works for one client may not work for another in cases just like this. In order to make as many happy as possible we use only the 'safest' anti-spam measures by default, and if those aren't adequate for a client then they can use their own anti-spam measures or participate in our Postini partnership. That's the crux of why we use Postini - we honestly make very little (if any) money off that partnership...

I thought smartermail 6 allows users to disable greylisting, at least on the server admin level it shows this option. Though on the user level I was unable to find where this toggle is.

Yes, SmarterMail 6 does allow greylisting to be disabled on a per domain basis, but still needs to be done as the server admin user. Once we get SmarterMail 6 implemented, this will be something we'll need to revisit.