$Cambridge: exim/doc/doc-txt/NewStuff,v 1.42 2005/05/17 15:00:04 ph10 Exp $ New Features in Exim -------------------- This file contains descriptions of new features that have been added to Exim, but have not yet made it into the main manual (which is most conveniently updated when there is a relatively large batch of changes). The doc/ChangeLog file contains a listing of all changes, including bug fixes. Exim version 4.52 ----------------- TF/01 Support for checking Client SMTP Authorization has been added. CSA is a system which allows a site to advertise which machines are and are not permitted to send email. This is done by placing special SRV records in the DNS, which are looked up using the client's HELO domain. At this time CSA is still an Internet-Draft. Client SMTP Authorization checks are performed by the ACL condition verify=csa. This will fail if the client is not authorized. If there is a DNS problem, or if no valid CSA SRV record is found, or if the client is authorized, the condition succeeds. These three cases can be distinguished using the expansion variable $csa_status, which can take one of the values "fail", "defer", "unknown", or "ok". The condition does not itself defer because that would be likely to cause problems for legitimate email. The error messages produced by the CSA code include slightly more detail. If $csa_status is "defer" this may be because of problems looking up the CSA SRV record, or problems looking up the CSA target address record. There are four reasons for $csa_status being "fail": the client's host name is explicitly not authorized; the client's IP address does not match any of the CSA target IP addresses; the client's host name is authorized but it has no valid target IP addresses (e.g. the target's addresses are IPv6 and the client is using IPv4); or the client's host name has no CSA SRV record but a parent domain has asserted that all subdomains must be explicitly authorized. The verify=csa condition can take an argument which is the domain to use for the DNS query. The default is verify=csa/$sender_helo_name. This implementation includes an extension to CSA. If the query domain is an address literal such as [192.0.2.95], or if it is a bare IP address, Exim will search for CSA SRV records in the reverse DNS as if the HELO domain was e.g. 95.2.0.192.in-addr.arpa. Therefore it is meaningful to say, for example, verify=csa/$sender_host_address - in fact, this is the check that Exim performs if the client does not say HELO. This extension can be turned off by setting the main configuration option dns_csa_use_reverse = false. If a CSA SRV record is not found for the domain itself, then a search is performed through its parent domains for a record which might be making assertions about subdomains. The maximum depth of this search is limited using the main configuration option dns_csa_search_limit, which takes the value 5 by default. Exim does not look for CSA SRV records in a top level domain, so the default settings handle HELO domains as long as seven (hostname.five.four.three.two.one.com) which encompasses the vast majority of legitimate HELO domains. The dnsdb lookup also has support for CSA. Although dnsdb already supports SRV lookups, this is not sufficient because of the extra parent domain search behaviour of CSA, and (as with PTR lookups) dnsdb also turns IP addresses into lookups in the reverse DNS space. The result of ${lookup dnsdb {csa=$sender_helo_name} } has two space-separated fields: an authorization code and a target host name. The authorization code can be "Y" for yes, "N" for no, "X" for explicit authorization required but absent, or "?" for unknown. PH/01 The amount of output produced by the "make" process has been reduced, because the compile lines are often rather long, making it all pretty unreadable. The new style is along the lines of the 2.6 Linux kernel: just a short line for each module that is being compiled or linked. However, it is still possible to get the full output, by calling "make" like this: FULLECHO='' make -e The value of FULLECHO defaults to "@", the flag character that suppresses command reflection in "make". When you ask for the full output, it is given in addition to the the short output. PH/02 There have been two changes concerned with submission mode: (a) A new option, /name=value, makes it possible to supply a user name to be inserted into any created Sender: header line. Typically, this would be looked up from $authenticated_id. (b) The envelope sender address is forced to be the same as the submission mode sender address. Version 4.51 ------------ PH/01 The format in which GnuTLS parameters are written to the gnutls-param file in the spool directory has been changed. This change has been made to alleviate problems that some people had with the generation of the parameters by Exim when /dev/random was exhausted. In this situation, Exim would hang until /dev/random acquired some more entropy. The new code exports and imports the DH and RSA parameters in PEM format. This means that the parameters can be generated externally using the certtool command that is part of GnuTLS. To replace the parameters with new ones, instead of deleting the file and letting Exim re-create it, you can generate new parameters using certtool and, when this has been done, replace Exim's cache file by renaming. The relevant commands are something like this: # rm -f new.params # touch new.params # chown exim:exim new.params # chmod 0400 new.params # certtool --generate-privkey --bits 512 >new.params # echo "" >>new.params # certtool --generate-dh-params --bits 1024 >> new.params # mv new.params params If Exim never has to generate the parameters itself, the possibility of stalling is removed. PH/02 A new expansion item for dynamically loading and calling a locally- written C function is now provided, if Exim is compiled with EXPAND_DLFUNC=yes set in Local/Makefile. The facility is not included by default (a suitable error is given if you try to use it when it is not there.) If you enable EXPAND_DLFUNC, you should also be aware of the new redirect router option forbid_filter_dlfunc. If you have unprivileged users on your system who are permitted to create filter files, you might want to set forbid_filter_dlfunc=true in the appropriate router, to stop them using ${dlfunc to run code within Exim. You load and call an external function like this: ${dlfunc{/some/file}{function}{arg1}{arg2}...} Once loaded, Exim remembers the dynamically loaded object so that it doesn't reload the same object file in the same Exim process (but of course Exim does start new processes frequently). There may be from zero to eight arguments to the function. When compiling a local function that is to be called in this way, local_scan.h should be included. The Exim variables and functions that are defined by that API are also available for dynamically loaded functions. The function itself must have the following type: int dlfunction(uschar **yield, int argc, uschar *argv[]) Where "uschar" is a typedef for "unsigned char" in local_scan.h. The function should return one of the following values: OK Success. The string that is placed in "yield" is put into the expanded string that is being built. FAIL A non-forced expansion failure occurs, with the error message taken from "yield", if it is set. FAIL_FORCED A forced expansion failure occurs, with the error message taken from "yield" if it is set. ERROR Same as FAIL, except that a panic log entry is written. When compiling a function that is to be used in this way with gcc, you need to add -shared to the gcc command. Also, in the Exim build-time configuration, you must add -export-dynamic to EXTRALIBS. TF/01 $received_time is a new expansion variable containing the time and date as a number of seconds since the start of the Unix epoch when the current message was received. PH/03 There is a new value for RADIUS_LIB_TYPE that can be set in Local/Makefile. It is RADIUSCLIENTNEW, and it requests that the new API, in use from radiusclient 0.4.0 onwards, be used. It does not appear to be possible to detect the different versions automatically. PH/04 There is a new option called acl_not_smtp_mime that allows you to scan MIME parts in non-SMTP messages. It operates in exactly the same way as acl_smtp_mime PH/05 It is now possible to redefine a macro within the configuration file. The macro must have been previously defined within the configuration (or an included file). A definition on the command line using the -D option causes all definitions and redefinitions within the file to be ignored. In other words, -D overrides any values that are set in the file. Redefinition is specified by using '==' instead of '='. For example: MAC1 = initial value ... MAC1 == updated value Redefinition does not alter the order in which the macros are applied to the subsequent lines of the configuration file. It is still the same order in which the macros were originally defined. All that changes is the macro's value. Redefinition makes it possible to accumulate values. For example: MAC1 = initial value ... MAC1 == MAC1 and something added This can be helpful in situations where the configuration file is built from a number of other files. PH/06 Macros may now be defined or redefined between router, transport, authenticator, or ACL definitions, as well as in the main part of the configuration. They may not, however, be changed within an individual driver or ACL, or in the local_scan, retry, or rewrite sections of the configuration. PH/07 $acl_verify_message is now set immediately after the failure of a verification in an ACL, and so is available in subsequent modifiers. In particular, the message can be preserved by coding like this: warn !verify = sender set acl_m0 = $acl_verify_message Previously, $acl_verify_message was set only while expanding "message" and "log_message" when a very denied access. PH/08 The redirect router has two new options, sieve_useraddress and sieve_subaddress. These are passed to a Sieve filter to specify the :user and :subaddress parts of an address. Both options are unset by default. However, when a Sieve filter is run, if sieve_useraddress is unset, the entire original local part (including any prefix or suffix) is used for :user. An unset subaddress is treated as an empty subaddress. PH/09 Quota values can be followed by G as well as K and M. PH/10 $message_linecount is a new variable that contains the total number of lines in the header and body of the message. Compare $body_linecount, which is the count for the body only. During the DATA and content-scanning ACLs, $message_linecount contains the number of lines received. Before delivery happens (that is, before filters, routers, and transports run) the count is increased to include the Received: header line that Exim standardly adds, and also any other header lines that are added by ACLs. The blank line that separates the message header from the body is not counted. Here is an example of the use of this variable in a DATA ACL: deny message = Too many lines in message header condition = \ ${if <{250}{${eval: $message_linecount - $body_linecount}}} In the MAIL and RCPT ACLs, the value is zero because at that stage the message has not yet been received. PH/11 In a ${run expansion, the variable $value (which contains the standard output) is now also usable in the "else" string. PH/12 In a pipe transport, although a timeout while waiting for the pipe process to complete was treated as a delivery failure, a timeout while writing the message to the pipe was logged, but erroneously treated as a successful delivery. Such timeouts include transport filter timeouts. For consistency with the overall process timeout, these timeouts are now treated as errors, giving rise to delivery failures by default. However, there is now a new Boolean option for the pipe transport called timeout_defer, which, if set TRUE, converts the failures into defers for both kinds of timeout. A transport filter timeout is now identified in the log output. Version 4.50 ------------ The documentation is up-to-date for the 4.50 release. ****