I can confirm, that the file "mailConfig.xml" was deleted even if it's marked as read-only. I made this experience on two servers after update to build 7906.

Thanks for pointing this out.

Is there any progress on declude reloaded to solve this issue permanently?

Second what @Ben said, would love to hear where the progress of Declude Reloaded is at, and possible when it will be released.

For us it is the point when we will switch to the newest version of Smartermail too. 

Declude is "end-of-life" since years. So far i know, the development and maintenance of the product has stopped.

But anyway, the problem can be solved easy without using rocket science: After the update of SmarterMail, simply copy a saved "mailConfig.xml" to the directory and mark it read-only. You may automate this with a simple batch.

At this point… I’m thinking declude is fully dead. 

@echoDreamz really? Is there a good alternative that you know of?

Declude works still very good, if you maintain your own filters and phrases.

Alternatives are the ususal suspects like SpamAssasin, Rspamd and many external services.

@echoDreamz  Declude has reached its EOL but is not dead. It still works absolutely fine, not sure where you are getting your information from but you may want to check with the people who manage Declude namely Mail's Best Friend. Declude has been rebuilt from the ground up as DR (Declude Reboot) which is currently in Beta testing.

DR has been in beta testing for quite a while now. Until I see proof of its existence, it’s vaporware.

In our environment, declude uses a TON of cpu resources, more than than the smartermail process itself does. Thanks mainly to all the regex matches. 

@echoDreamz criticism is easy. Any guy sporting a Fu Manchu wearing a baseball cap can do that. What we need is real feedback and help - which is beneficial to the entire community and gets DR out to users sooner. Would you be a beta tester for us? 

I've been waiting for Linda to get back to me for well over a year on that. We certainly wouldnt mind giving it a go.

The main issue is the lack of communications about DR and even Declude, the declude page shows a last updated of 2020 (a year ago nearly, maybe not accurate?). As well, not a word about DR here, social media (that I could find), I havent received anything via email since the beginning of last year.

@echoDreamz.. I checked and you are not following us on Twitter or Facebook and you are not a part of our MBF community list and have never asked us to add you. Our beta testing is currently a closed beta and not public. If you wanted to know you just needed to ask. Our goal is to work out as many of the kinks as we can before releasing a public beta. We want to make for the best experience with as few issues as possible. If you have the time and are serious about providing detailed feedback, problem reporting and feature requests, we are very happy to have you. We will reach out to you directly to talk about how you could contribute. 

Linda, my username here doesn’t reflect anything business related. I’ll DM you. 

Thanks!

@Linda Pagillo I am on your community mailinglist, but I did never get an update about the status of Declude Reboot. Would you  mind posting an ETA or status update here for all of us?

@echoDreamz: You can avoid high CPU load with clever design of your rules.

Mostly the rule-files doesn't check if a previous filter has triggered or not. Therefore not needed tests will be made which causes a CPU load. A check for already given points is the key to low cpu load.

I run the different fien granulated tests in around 190 small rule files, created for specific themes. In the first lines of each file a "testFailed" command checks the actual situation and leaves the file, if possible.

@J.Dikkenberg... DR is currently in private beta testing. We have a meeting with our devs on Friday late afternoon. I will post a DR status update by the following Monday. Thanks for your patience :)

Martin, I have a ton of other things to do than going and designing rules for Declude :)

@Linda Pagillo
Great! Let the community know what it is exactly.

I am specifically interested in:

- How it is integrated with Smartermail 

- How easy it is to use and test

- What it exactly does

- What it can handle under heavy load

- If it has an API or webhook functionality 

Maybe it is feature complete but I would love to be able to run Declude on existing mail to test the rules, maybe from the Webmail.

Same thing happened to me! The read only
mailConfig.xml file got deleted. Fortunately had a backup copy of it. This workaround has been fine for 2 years.

Hey everyone! We met with our devs on Friday and there are a few more things that need to happen before we can make DR a public beta. With that being said, we do not have an ETA for public beta at this time.

@EchoDreamz... I will be reaching out to you later today via email about the status of your beta.

@J. Dikkenberg... To answer your questions...

- How it is integrated with SmarterMail

DR is a brand new program built from the ground up and we are very pleased to say that is it cross-platform! We have different modules to integrate with the different MTAs out there (SmarterMail, Postfix etc...)

- How easy it is to use and test

Currently, DR text file based so it is easy to install and manage. As for testing, we are working on putting together a default configuration file set to make testing easier. DR is a very powerful and robust
program and the configuration options are basically endless so we want to give everyone something to start with that makes sense and will be effective.

- What it exactly does

DR will perform anti spam and antivirus checks just as any anti-spam system. It works with a weighting system just as the current Declude does. The more important aspect of DR is it provides the administrator the ability to control and manage the flow of emails, traffic and can run any kind of test for any purpose the administrator may have. We like to call it EPIC the (Email Processing Integration Center).

- What it can handle under heavy load

DR is lightweight and is designed to handle anything that the hardware can handle. Load will not be an issue.

- If it has an API or webhook functionality

No, DR does not have an API or webhook as of yet. However, we developed DR in a way which will allow others to build their own custom modules for it if they like. 

Please let me know if you have further questions. Thanks.

Linda many thanks for answering all the questions we had, I am sure we are going to like it!

My pleasure J!

Our mailconfig.xml got deleted too.

We have been using Declude since Scott first made it.

Looking forward to the next chapter of Declude.

Looks like even a smartermail service restart also deletes the mailconfig.xml file 😩

SM Service crashed earlier, auto restarted, but then everything was stuck in the spool for 6 hours until I noticed!

I assumed declude only reads in the file once on startup, does it continuously check it?

Same here, if the SM service is restarted, it deletes the mailconfig.xml  file! It did not used to do this.

To answer my own question, server did a windows update, xml was renamed, but naming it back without a service restart was enough to get mail flowing again.

I guess just setting up a scheduled task to run every minute renaming the file back should be enough?

Hello everyone, and apologies for the delay in getting back to you on this. During some subsequent re-tests around these issues we were able to find the mailconfig.xml file being removed/cleaned up on service start, and so we're working our way through a couple of additional tests now and will get this over to development to be looked at once more. Thanks for your feedback everyone!

I have some new information. I did some troubleshooting this morning as well as a video capture and determined that when I restart the SM service, the mailconfig.xml remains untouched. When I restarted the Declude service, the mailconfig.xml was deleted instantly. 

Thanks for your follow-up on this Mike. I was able to find a replicable set of steps that causes the mailconfig.xml to become a mailconfig.old.xml, so I've escalated this to development since it appears to be ignoring the read only flag. I was testing this on servers with no Declude setup whatsoever, so I think we may have an issue on both sides. Perhaps Linda can chime in here?

In the meantime, if you find yourself with a stalled spool because Declude isn't running you can correct this by copying in a new copy of the mailconfig.xml file and setting the read only flag once more, then starting Declude back up. If you restart the service you may see this happen again, so keeping a copy of the file handy is not a bad idea. 

Kyle I will need to do some testing over here. Declude has not be changed at all so I'm not sure why restarting it would cause the deletion of the file. All Declude is doing is reading it. I will look into this and do some testing as soon as I can.

Thanks Linda. I wasn't seeing this either so I wonder if this might have been SM doing it and it just looked like Declude did it? Is that possible Mike?

What I know so far is that a simple restart of Declude does not delete or rename the file. I have a SM server where I'm running Declude and I just restarted Declude by itself and all good. Nothing broke.

Awesome thanks Linda! I'll do some testing around this as well once I get our in-house Declude test environment back up and running today. 

Kyle, I just tested on one of my SM servers. I stopped the SM service then started it. The mailconfig.xml was renamed to mailconfig.old.xml. Just as you said, it looks like the SM is ignoring the Read-Only flag. As for Declude.. I'm not seeing what Mike is seeing when restarting it.

Here is my video capture. As you can see, Declude caused the file to be deleted.

Mike, can you do something for me please? After you restart the SM service, before you restart Declude, refresh your screen and let me know if the file was renamed, deleted or neither.

Do we have some secret magic happen?

How can decludeproc.exe with a timestamp of 06.03.2015 delete a file which wasn't the case for the last six years or so? I do not believe this at all.

Unitl we have final answers i will have a ride on my unicorn into the sunset.
 

I tested today and Declude is not renaming or deleting the file. It is not able to do that. It seems as though SM is not honoring the read-only flag on the file.

Perhaps in my case Declude prevents the file from being deleted by Smartermail until the Declude service was restarted?

It's clear from the video that the file instantly disappeared as soon as declude was restarted and it had nothing to do with refreshing etc because the file disappeared without refreshing in real-time. 

Declude only reads that file. It is unable to delete or rename it.

Today i had to restart the server and i had the opportunity to play a minute with those two services.
I restarted the services a few times:
- The service of declude does not delete the file.
- The service of SmarterMail deletes the file even if the attribut Read-Only is set.

That's it

Thanks for testing Martin. That was the same result I had.

I have another update to explain the previous video capture. It appears that there is a delay on my setup after the SM service restarts before SM deletes the mailconfig.xml. This explains why it gave the illusion that Declude had deleted the file. It was just a coincidence on the timing. Today I waited and noticed that after a few seconds the xml file disappeared.
 

Thanks Mike, appreciate the confirmation here. Was hoping we are facing just the one issue and not two :-P

Any word on a fix?

We have some changes coming in our next release which will help improve Declude usability with SmarterMail. More information to come! 

Alright,  This is not pretty, but is what I just implemented.

1) Created a file "DecludeFix.cmd" in the root of the C Drive  The content of the file is:

@if exist D:\SmarterMail\Service\mailconfig.xml goto:eof
@copy c:\mailconfig.xml d:\smartermail\service\mailconfig.xml
@echo %date% - %time% >> c:\DecludeFix.log
@net start Decludeproc

2) Moved a good copy of my mailconfg.xml file to the root of the C: drive

3) Set up a scheduled task to run every 15 minutes.

The batch file checks to see if the mailconfig.xml file exists, if it does the batch file closes.

If the file does not exist, the batch file will copy the file from the C:\ location to the location that the file should exist, then starts the Decludeproc service just in case it was not running.  I also added a simple log that can be reviewed to see when the batch file actually had to do something.

You of course will need to update the paths to match your server config.