SmarterMail v17 (now called v100) was released for production on Dec 3rd with Build 6911. it would appear that SmarterTools is using Build Numbers like Windows 10 does, and is no longer using the "Major" and "Minor" release designations.

They discussed these changes and the production release in their last blog post on Nov 1st...but Dec 3rd came and went with little other fanfare other than following through on the changes they had announced from the month before. It was easy to miss and a little confusing initially, tbh.

Thank you for the clarification.  It is indeed confusing and not having an "official release" like always, gives the impression that it is not ready as a finished product. A major fail in their communication strategy. Oh well. 

This definitely confused many of us.. just look through the different community threads. I`m hoping that at least when MAPI is out they will provide an official blog post / newsletter.

On the other hand, v17/100/current build behaves and performs better than v15 and v16 did, so if you can, it would probably be a good idea to give it a try.

Well I usually dont jump directly to major upgrades since they are always full of bugs, but its good to know that v 17 is better than 16.  We might install it soon then!  Thanks

After using SmarterMail for over 10 years have found that it is best to wait 3 months after new releases before SmarterMail becomes stable enough for production use. With SmarterMail 16, 7 months was needed after the release before it was stable enough for production use. Therefore do not like this new build number method.

It also means that do not know when major changes have been made that require 3-month hold off in updating to wait for the bugs to be fixed.

Unless SmarterTools have made some major changes to the way it tests it's software to ensure that bugs no-longer reach the released builds then I can see this new build number approach being a very bad idea. 

Yes, but stay right where you are... We have so many tickets open and more and more clients daily finding issues and strange bugs.

We currently have a bug with SmarterMail 16 and were planning to update to v100 in January as it seems it's the answer for every bug fix about SM16 now. 

echoDreams, are you suggesting we should still wait and stay with our current bug instead of installing v100 which may (or may not) fix our current issue but also add new ones ?

It took us so much time to have a stable V16 with finally satisfied customers. We're a bit worried to switch to v100 :/

Thanks you for your feedback.

Ok, perhaps the "Dont do it" was a bit much. We are struggling with SM 17 right now. So many issues that are causing headaches for our users and weird behavior of IDS blocks and numerous other problems.

You may not experience these issues as a lot of our problems are due to the size of our mail server. We updated back during the first week of December, SM 16 was actually getting really stable for us, but SM 17 promised a lot of features that our users have been asking for. Unfortunately, it has caused a massive headache for us.

My advice, try it in a VM or something and see how it behaves, test and retest everything you rely on before committing to the production update.

Ive followed the bugs listed within the community and my opinion is that Smartermail (17) is not ready for production use.

Im sure the other hosters can agree that issues pertaining to / relating from mail are the quickest way to loose clients, or have clients loose faith in your brand.

For now, as others have suggested, install on a VM where you're able to test it internally, test test test and keep an eye on the community posts to keep abreast of changes / fixes.

Unfortunately, with the 16 issues and now the 17 issues, our clients have started calling it "DumberMail" (most popular) or "AlwaysBrokenNeverWorkingMail" or "RandomMail" along with others. We continue defending it though. Just need to work through the issues and get it stable. A server of our size is always hard to test for issues.

echoDreams, our server is quite big too. Around 5k domains and 20k+ mailboxes. We already lost customers that moved to exchange or other hoster because of mail issues we had with v16.

We did a snapshot/clone of our current install and tried out an update to v100 two weeks ago. Our first internal tests showed that Sharepoint/Add to oulook feature was broken (and quite some of users are using this).
This issue is now resolved in recent builds, but we are still not sure if we can now trustfully switch to v100.

I think that we will wait a bit more, we don't want to jump again yet in the daily issues with our mail server and unsatisfied customers.

As for the service nicknames, one of our customer called our mail service "SmarterFail" ...

We are also defending it and we like SmarterMail, but our main work is to bring a stable service to our customers and this has been difficult lately. We're now stuck between a bug on V16 that will probably never be adressed as the support for it is dropped and a promising v100 that is not production ready yet.

You are up there with us. then no, stay away from SM 17 for now.

Here is a list of items we have...

We have around 3.5 pages of tickets for just SM 17 alone.

UPDATE - 01-23-2019 Almost all issues have been fixed.

Some of the CPU issue too may be that we have users with many many years of Calendar events, as we have no retention policy in place (changing soon). However, this was never an issue with SM16 and lower.

After upgrading to the newer "build" and having several issues.. I'm having to uninstall and reinstall to older version. :(

I used to have SM15 I believe. Never gave 16 a try. Any recommendations on whether to stick with 15 or go with 16?

Is there any documentation on doing a fresh install to older version and then restoring config from an earlier saved domain??

Help appreciated!

16 was really decent after about a year into the production beta. We left it earlier this month, we didnt really have any major issues or even any minor ones that I can recall.

wow echoDreamz, thanks for sharing your issues list.

Seems you're right, if we swith to v17/100 now, we're kinda dead.

We better keep our current v16 bug that is annoying (some mails are stuck in the pool for 2 hours and then get deleted without being delivered anywhere, around 30-40 mails per day and 90% are spam) but not that much a problem compared to this list.

We had another bug, with Cyren Antispam plugin which stop working after a few day, but we got rid of this and most antispam problem by installing a front end scanner (E.F.A.) and only using custom spam rules on SmarterMail,  based on custom mail headers we set from E.F.A. 

Other than that we were satisfied with the stability of SM16.

It would be useful to have a list of remaining known bugs in the changelog so we know where we're going when updating ...

We have 12,000 users and like echoDreamz lost allot of customers when we moved to SmaterMail 16, even though we waited 6 months after it's release it was still totally full of bugs.

New versions of SmarterMail are never production ready it always takes at least 3 months before it becomes production ready after a new release. 

Until SmarterTools improve their in-house testing going to version numbers is NOT a good thing.

For the moment we are going to wait at least 3 months before moving to the new SmarterMail in the hope they fix the bugs. 

Due to the size of our server and the amount of data, connections, traffic etc. that it handles, a lot of the issues never show up until we install it. Though with us allowing SmarterTools to run profilers etc. on our server to find these performance issues and better optimize code, it trickles down to everyone :)

Upgraded to 17.x today and it won't bind the protocol ports.  netstat -a shows no open ports.  Web mail works fine but 25/110/143/993/etc are all broken.  Server is down essentially until SmarterTools opens for business because it converted all the accounts during the upgrade!

UPDATE:  Rebooted, logged back into webmail as admin, says it wasn't activated anymore! (should be it asked for credentials during install!).  Reactivated license, connections still 0 (not accepting connections from protocols).  Restarted SmarterMail service and its now answering requests although its running at extremely high CPU 60-99%

Yeah, the high CPU usage has been normal for us. Even on our backup gateways that arent handling bazillions of email, SM is eating as much CPU as it can.

We had the same licensing issue when we attempted our first 16->17 upgrade.

It asks for your license when updating but then it's not activated, you have to activate it again from the admin interface after restarting the services.

We thought we did something wrong, but since we're not alone, they might need to address this issue too.

For CPU usage we don't know what we will face as we did not attempted to update our live production server yet...

Yes, here as well. Install did licensing info, SM started, but with missing licensing info, had to input it again and activate.

After updating had to disable Reverse DNS lookup.  Spam filter was blocking Gmail, Hotmail and others.  Could be other spam settings causing issues.  Same spam settings worked flawlessly for past year on SM15/16, but under SM17 it's blocking legitimate systems constantly

We just had to turn off our reverse dns as well do to that. 

We've seen no issues with RDNS etc. What DNS servers are you using within SmarterMail's settings? I believe previous versions of SmarterMail used the DNS servers that Windows had defined on the nic whereas 17 uses a different DNS system and as far as I know uses SmarterMail's defined DNS servers.

We use the Google 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as our two. If there are any better and more reliable always open up. Have debated on using the new Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 server as well.

settings.json:

"brute_force_login": {

      "is_enabled": true,    <--change to false

      "retries": 10,

      "timeout": 10,

      "timeframe": 6

    },

    "brute_force_email_login": {

      "is_enabled": true,    <--change to false

      "retries": 5,

      "timeout": 10,

      "timeframe": 6

    },

After upgrading we were constantly being locked out by people trying to use authenticate as 'admin'.  All it took was a single person trying to hit 'admin' acct and it would prevent us from logging in as admin and even staying logged in as admin!  

Hmm, I cannot say, we use our own resolvers for performance as well as public ones generally are blocked by RBLs for high usage.

We fully block on RBL failures (including FCDNS) and have had no issues with false rejections.

We completely killed the brute_force webmail stuff, it has issues. It's been off for a week or so now and not a single complaint. When we had it on, clients were mad that they were getting IMAP blocked, POP blocked etc. Would love to have it on (especially the by IP address option for webmail), but something is wrong with the IDS system.

Chris, after a line-by-line code analysis we have determined how the email brute force detection system was being SO aggressive.  This has been fixed and will be available in the next release of SmarterMail.

Robert,

Sounds awesome.

If you're link-balancing your outbound connections between 2 or more ISPs, most ISP's DNS servers won't work with the other ISP(s). We have successfully used Google's DNS servers and OpenDNS servers with no issues. 

Our volume is not as great as some folks; we don't see any high-usage related RBL blocks from these.

I came across this threat because I was saying to myself "Is v17 ever getting released ..." and now I see that it has been. I agree with most of the previous posts that the communications of the release were horrible. Also, I can't really see V16 > V17 instructions. Does the v17 installer automatically upgrade? By the looks of some of the comments I think I am going to be waiting a while ... 

I can confirm the CPU usage has been dramatically reduced with the 6942 build with only spikes here and there. Can also confirm the IDS issues have been fixed. Though we do still have some odd / strange bugs coming up and then disappearing. Overall though, SM17 is stable.

Did you implement the calendar cleaning?

Tim,

Not yet, we are still working with some clients to get a good backup / archive of their events before wiping them.

Been a few days running the updated IDS fixes, still not using the webmail block on address, but we've had zero reports of any issues, so looks like the issues have been resolved with IDS issues.

Thanks for the updates.

Hi, was there a fix that resolves the "Add to Outlook" feature broken? I have several clients where some users Shared calendar links were broken and I cannot get them to sync after deleting and re-adding to Outlook. We're on version 6925 and Getting error:  

Task 'SharePoint' reported error (0x8004010F) : 'The SharePoint List (SmarterMail - PRA Calendar) cannot be found. If the problem continues, contact the SharePoint site administrator.  HTTP 404.'

Thanks for all you do. 

@Tim

"The only outstanding issues with SmarterMail that affect a handful of customers are some CPU and Memory optimizations and IDS Blocks occurring when they shouldn't.  Both of these have already been resolved and been provided to customers as hot fixes.  They will be pubiclily available this week. "

What version will address these fixes?

Once these have been addressed then we'll gladly look at rolling out the latest version of SM into our live environment and be able to provide more detailed error reporting.

@Jade D - we will be releasing a build tonight (1/9) that includes fixes for both the IDS issue and the CPU/memory optimizations, along with several other additions/changes/fixes.

@William Philliber

  I believe this was fixed in build 6928 (Dec 20, 2018), released 3 days after the version you are running.  But you can wait and install today's build and have even more fixes!

Thanks Derek Curtis - are these changes published in version 6498?​​

Looking forward to it!

Just installed release 6948 and still have users who cannot sync to shared calendars with error
Task 'SharePoint' reported error (0x8004010F) : 'The SharePoint List (SmarterMail - PRACalendar) cannot be found. If the problem continues, contact the SharePoint site administrator.  HTTP 404.'

So far, these are IMAP users on Outlook 2010 & 2013. Their sharepoint list says the permissions are "Read". I've also put in a support ticket. 

 

@William Philliber

We had the same issue and opened a ticket about it. However it seemed to us it was fixed in 6928 as the problem was gone.

Now we are still on version 6928 so I don't know, maybe the fix for it didn't make it to 6948 ? or it's not completly fixed...

There definitely seems to be some issues with shared resources. For us, if we do not use any shared resources, SmarterMail 17 works perfectly, including the synchronization with Outlook. If we create and then map shared resources to users (especially conference rooms), then RAM usage shoots up to impossible levels and synchronization with Outlook stops for the users that have the shared resources mapped. More info: https://portal.smartertools.com/community/a91509/calendar-is-no-longer-accessible-sm17-100-build-6928-permission-error-array-dimensions.aspx#118539

We also have a ticket opened on this.

Lonel, I reviewed your ticket.  Kyle gave you a build over a week ago to install and he has been waiting for your feedback.  What was sent to you along with many more improvements were released to the public yesterday.  You should install the public build from yesterday, not the build we gave you over a week ago.

Hi,

As part of the troubleshooting, we installed Build 6942.2732 and I also installed Build 6942.30788 when it was provided, but as I mentioned at the ticket, family and work stuff intervened and had no more chance to test the issues, let alone to do the memory traces. Last week there was time, but this week there is little chance I will get to do it.

For now we are relatively happy that with 6942.30788 and no shared resources mapped to anyone, SmarterMail is working decently (synchronization with Outlook works fine and RAM consumption is normal). Since I had no time to do more troubleshooting, I left it at that, even though people ask daily about what happened with the Shared Resources and when they can use them again.

I became aware today that there is a new public build - maybe I can install it tonight, but cannot promise. More likely I`ll install it during the week-end. 

Next week we will test again mapping shared resources to users and see how SM performs, then if the bugs still occur I`ll update the tickets.

Best,

Ionel

SM17 upgrade drops ALL GREYLISTED IP ADDRESSES!!!  Upgraded two servers from SM15 to SM17 and now we have 0 ips listed under AntiSpam/IP Bypass.  Thank you SmarterTools appreciate it!

Problem exists for SM15->SM16 and SM15->SM17.  Someone forgot to account for ips that previously were whitelisted in greylisting!

Could you elaborate more? We don't have a section to manage greylist anymore and neither did SM16. IP Bypasses don't have anything to do with IP addresses that are greylisted. Did you have bypasses setup that disappeared?

Edit: 15 did have a section to manage these and it is currently being discussed internally on getting it added back.

SM16 and SM17 have an IP BYPASS GREYLISTING section....  Unfortunately all addresses that are set to bypass greylisting in SM15 never upgrade to SM16/SM17

I apologize if this is a very stupid question - But I cannot seem to find any documentation on the 16 > 17 upgrade procedure. Is it as simple as doing what I do for a minor upgrade? Stop IIS, uninstall from Control Panel, install new installer? 

Is there anything my users need to know going from 16 > 17? 

So your first post mentions upgrading to SmarterMail 17 from SmarterMail 16 and losing your IP Bypasses. However, recently you mentioned that the upgrade from 15 to 16/17 is failing to migrate the IP Bypasses. I'm not sure exactly where you are coming from and what caused the issue. We didn't make any functional changes to how we store that data in SmarterMail 16, we did in SmarterMail 17.
What did you upgrade from?-to?, since there is a big difference between upgrading to 16 vs 17. 

They are lost when upgrading from SM15 to SM16/SM17

@Joe, Yes you install SmarterMail as you normally would. It will automatically perform the conversion.
If you have a lot of domains or a very large amount of users you can check on the progress at
http://<yourserver>/interface/convert-status
However, this normally runs very very quickly.

Howdy Matt, 

Brian is either referring to 

Settings > Anti Spam > IP Bypasses

or 

Settings > Security > Whitelist

@Brian

May be helpful if exact information is provided, including upgrade path and exactly what is missing.

@Derek or @Matt

"@Jade D - we will be releasing a build tonight (1/9) that includes fixes for both the IDS issue and the CPU/memory optimizations, along with several other additions/changes/fixes. "

My Response "Thanks Derek Curtis - are these changes published in version 6498? "

Jade D, are you saying a new release again tonight on (1/10) or was the previous post a mistake?

@Jade D -- Yes, both the CPU/Memory item and IDS are in the release notes for the 6948 build.

Settings > Anti Spam > IP Bypasses

Is empty when you upgrade from sm15->sm16/17

So you have to manually input then again!

Bypass Greylist IP ranges like eBay, PayPal, etc

@Derek - thanks a ton for the response - will start the upgrades on our SM servers tomorrow evening

@William  - Im not saying anything, I was merely asking for a response Derek as my question seemed to get lost between all the other questions, which is no fault of anyone

@Brian - Will make a note to keep a copy of the xml files when we upgrade from version 16 to the latest and advise if I experience the same.

As for updating from version 15 to 16 or even 15 to 16 to current - I dont recall as SM15 is well over two years old and a lot has happened since then.

In any event, you should always test your upgrades in a test environment as there are many factors involved in an upgrade.

Jade D

The SM16->SM17 will probably carry over the IP BYPASS values (if you use them for greylisting).  Its the SM15->16/17 where Smartertools dropped the ball.  They figured people didn't need/want their ip ranges to bypass the greylisting anymore I guess

Hi

We are currently testing Smartermail to replace our older mail server software.

Im must say I really like what I see. But I was surprised by finding some serious issues.
(I only now found that this version is just released) .


But from my view it should not have been put in production yet.


Testing as a new client I found to many bugs.
Some we are able to tweak our self - so we might still be a new client.


Im testing the professional version.

- Throttle not working. (max messages per hour set to 10, +1000 mail send in 31 minutes).
This is a huge issue as this is our only protection from misuse of hached account.

- Disk usage are calculated wrong. Seems some only show inbox. but not sure thats the only issue.

- Domain validation forward address and trusted sender: "-" in domain name is wrongly taken as invalid.

- If I change primary domain admin and then delete the old admin user,
the "administrator" tab still count 2 admins, but only one is listed.
In accounts.json both still remain in the "primary_domain_admin" setting.

- Trial license does not allow support ticket.

API:
- Creating new domains return error: "unable to login" - but domain seems to be created anyway.
- Domains are created with DKIM on, with empty data. (set to off in domain defaults).
- Chat (showInXmpp) is set ON as default (from API) and the user are unable to save without switching it off first. (set to off in defaults).
- Is it legacy or not? Dont call retract it until you 100% offer a new API.


Options I would like to see:
- Possible to store password using nonreversible encryption.

- Enterprise only features should be hidden not grayed out in professional version.
- Disable/hide users access to functions like calendar, tasks, notes, news feed.
- If maximum are set e.g. for throttling it should show on user pages - not unlimited.
- POP before SMTP validation to allow outgoing mail. This have been a feature in icewarp for the last 10 years or more. (And an option in many email clients)

Frank,

I'm glad to hear that you are testing SmarterMail. Hopefully these answers your questions:

 
"Throttle not working. (max messages per hour set to 10, +1000 mail send in 31 minutes)."
This is a recent change we were making to allow it in Professional Edition (previously it was Enterprise-only). Although it could be configured in the front-end, the backend changes had not yet been finalized. This has been completed and will be in the next public release.
 
"Disk usage are calculated wrong. Seems some only show inbox. but not sure thats the only issue."
This was a known issue that was already in our bugs list. This has been completed and will be in the next public release.
 
"Domain validation forward address and trusted sender: "-" in domain name is wrongly taken as invalid."
This was a known issue that was already in our bugs list. This has been completed and will be in the next public release.
 
"If I change primary domain admin and then delete the old admin user, the Administrator tab still count 2 admins, but only one is listed."
I was able to replicate this bug. It has been added to our bugs list.
 
"Trial license does not allow support ticket."
Trial licenses DO have support since most customers are working with a sales person.  The sales person can make a support ticket if they are unable to answer  questions.  Submit a ticket via sales@smartertools.com to start the discussion and request support.

API Defaults:
We will review the current defaults and revise as necessary. In regards to the legacy comment, our old SOAP APIs that were used in SmarterMail 15 and prior are considered legacy. They are not be actively maintained. Starting with SmarterMail 16, we moved to REST APIs. Currently, we have several customers that use Control Panels that rely on the legacy SOAP APIs and why they have NOT been removed from the product. The web interface relies completely on the new REST APIs. Though we have not released all of the API documentation, we have given instructions to those customers who have asked for it.
 
Other Issues:
* Several months ago there was a very active discussion about password storage and the roles that system and domain administrator play with their customers. It has been our goal to move to hashed or salted encrypted passwords that are one-way. Because of the LOUD feedback from the community, we have kept the passwords as is. By default password visibility is OFF.  The link to the community discussion is here: https://portal.smartertools.com/community/a87728/show-password-in-15_x.aspx

* Regarding Enterprise-only features, we do this intentionally so people can see what functionality is available in the product.

* In version 15 we had the ability to hide sections but it was used very rarely. It has been requested only a few times over the last couple years and so it's not high on the list.

* You can set up events to send email notifications when a domain / user disk space reaches a defined percentage or size. Please refer to this help documentation: https://help.smartertools.com/smartermail/current/?page=index.sysadmin-settings.events.specific&v=100.0.6962

* POP before SMTP was needed 10 years ago because SMTP Authentication didn’t exist.  Now every client supports SMTP Authentication is what should be used moving forward.

Hope this helps,

Thanks Tim.

Happy to see the fast bug fixes.

I agree its fine to show available enterprise only features for the administrator. But im not happy our clients (domain admins and user) can see it. I think it will cause confusion and extra support time for us.
But we can removed it from the html code our self. (It just make our updating harder).