We have found a software error in one of the logging modules within Spam Safe Mail. We are working on a fix for this issue. However, this only affects logging, it does not affect the operation of Spam Safe Mail. Filtering and routing of all email is still fully working, this software error only affects the logging / reporting. Users end of day reports are not thought to be affected.
Partners needing to check routing of email requiring the MTA routing logs may need to contact us for assistance.
Technical Issue
There are two modules that read the raw mail logs, one called “Filter” that reads the filtering logs, and one called “MTA” (Mail Transfer Agent) that reads the email routing logs. This latter MTA one sometimes erroneously records “Email From” and “Email To” the wrong way around. Partners may see this in the MTA logs by sending an outbound email, where you will then see it may appear in the logs as an inbound email erroneously.
The reason for this has not been discovered, however, we are studying the logs and comparing the expected outcome with the actual outcome carefully and will update this status once more is known.
Updates
2025-05-07 @ 23:35 Monitoring and capturing logs.
2025-05-08 @ 10:40 Found a comment in the MTA code that says… “# Fudge DomainName for AddToWhiteList function”
2025-05-08 @ 10:45 Not sure why this is in there, or if the call to the AddToWhiteList function requires EmailFrom and EmailTo to be a particular way around. Investigating further…
2025-05-08 @ 11:24 The reason for the swap is so that outgoing email auto white lists the domain it is sending to, and the AddToWhiteList function requires it the same as if a user had manually added the domain to the whitelist from the SpamBin, ie an incoming email. We are looking into either re-writing this function, or, creating a cloned function to facilitate the automatic white listing of an EmailTo domain for outbound emails.
2025-05-08 @ 11:43 Actually the quickest fix is to simply swap the EmailFrom and EmailTo variables back to how they were before calling the AddToWhiteList function.
2025-05-08 @ 12:04 We have this working in DEV, and we are now testing further in the TST environment.
2025-05-08 @ 12:44 This fix should be in PRD by 13:00 at the latest. However, existing log records will be showing as incorrect. We are working on an additional patch to correct the older data.
2025-05-08 @ 14:01 This has been in PRD since 1pm and is working correctly.
Data Correction
2025-05-08 @ 14:11 We are now working on a new module called “ssm-mta-fix” that can be run manually to fix the EmailFrom and EmailTo by swapping them where necessary by checking against the source MTA log. This should be complete by the end of the day.
2025-05-08 @ 14:51 This new module is now being tested in TST.
2025-05-08 @ 15:36 We have identified that there are 66,538 MTA records that need correction, (out of around 1.2 million).
2025-05-08 @ 15:41 Correcting data… (this may take a while)
2025-05-08 @ 17:49 All data corrected.
