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Unreleased Changes in The Mainline

Breaking Changes

  • kcli bounce-list no longer returns json output by default. Use --json to explicitly request json output.
  • The filename format for log file segments now includes fractional seconds so that there is no chance of file naming collision when using aggressively small values for max_file_size or max_segment_duration.
  • TSA rules will no longer by default match internally generated failure responses, that is, those that begin with the text KumoMTA internal:. This prevents accidentally triggering cyclical behavior in the case where you have a very lenient regex for a rule that triggers a suspension. If you have rules that you wish to intentionally match these internal messages, you can mark the automation entry with match_internal = true to allow the match to be considered.
  • The SMTP client will now look for the system CA-certificate bundle when making connections. If no CA-certificate bundle is present, it will have no available trust store and will not be able to successfully establish TLS sessions. Previously, we used a bundled hard-coded, non-extensible, copy of the Mozilla CA certificate store. You must therefore ensure that you install the ca-certificates package for your system, or otherwise contrive to populate the system certificate store.

Other Changes and Enhancements

  • Queue and Egress configs can now be set to work in a mode where they refresh when the underlying configuration files have changed, rather than always reloading on a schedule. This makes a difference for sites with many queues. This mode is used for the shaping and queue helpers.

  • Improved performance of /metrics and /metrics.json endpoint generation; these endpoints now stream data rather than buffering and sending to the client. This makes a big difference for systems with over 1 million queues.

  • kcli top and kcli queue-summary now use streaming mertrics parsers to improve latency with systems with over 1 million queues.

  • HTTP clients can now opt-in to compressed responses by setting their Accept-Encoding header. We support gzip and deflate compression. Compression is set to Fastest rather than Best, which produces good results without costing too much CPU or request latency. We do not support compressed bodies at this time.

  • Optimized per-message overheads in the scheduled queue, reduced the memory utilization by 112 bytes per message.

  • Changed the default queue strategy to SingletonTimerWheel.

  • kcli trace-smtp-client and kcli trace-smtp-server both have some new options: --terse to make it easier to get the sense of the flow of messages without seeing all of the message body data, --only-new to trace only sessions for which the tracer client has observed the session opening, and --only-one to trace just a single session.

  • The HTTP injection API now supports an optional deferred_spool parameter that allows deferring writing the message(s) spool for a given send attempt, deferred_generation for quickly accepting a batch for asynchronous generation, and you can control a rate limit for ingress using kumo.set_httpinject_recipient_rate_limit.

  • We now randomize the set of hosts within a given MX preference level when computing the connection plan for an individual session. This helps to probablistically load balance across the advertised hosts for the destination.

  • The /api/admin/bounce/v1 no longer returns any partial statistics from the bounce. On systems with very large numbers of queues, returning data in this context would take too long. The endpoint will now return immediately and report the id of the bounce entry, but no other statistics.

  • kcli bounce-list now summarizes the bounce information in a human readable format by default, rather than showing the underlying json data as we did in previous releases.

  • The log_hooks helper now supports batching using the new batch_size parameter and send_batch method. See the example

  • Added proxy_connection_failures and bind_failures counters to track the number of times that kumod either failed to connect to an egress proxy server, or failed to directly bind a source address. Both of these events typically indicate a severe issue with the local infrastructure, either in terms of a configuration error or production service availability.

  • The validate-shaping utility and underlying kumo.shaping.load function now support options to control whether individual checks should be warnings, errors or be ignored. The shaping helper allows specifying these options as load_validation_options (for regular load-time checks) and validation_options (for --validate mode).

  • The requeue_message event now also receives the SMTP response that led to the requeue event being triggered.

  • The bounce classifier will now automatically reload when the configuration epoch is updated. #298

  • Spool enumeration completion no longer prevents the reception of new messages. The spool does need to have started before messages will be received, which means that there is still a very small window during startup where the liveness check and SMTP sessions can turn away incoming connections.

  • The dkim helper now supports passing the expiration value through to the underlying signer.

  • HTTP injection now includes control over the trace_headers, which now default to including the supplemental trace header for FBL/ARF processing, but not including the Received header. These parameters are set per-request.

  • Added remember_broken_tls option to streamline dealing with sites with broken TLS.

Fixes

  • kcli trace-smtp-client and kcli trace-smtp-server would always report 0ns for sessions for which we had not observed the session opening. Now we will assume a start time time of the first record observed for a session, so that some sense of relative time can be gleaned from the trace output.

  • When using the dkim helper and splitting the configuration across multiple files, a missing domain or base configuration section in any individual file would raise a validation error.

  • Punycode encoded domain names would resolve to the unicode representation of the domain name internally, and in the case of domains with no explicit MX records, the fallback record that was synthesized from the domain name would also be encoded in the unicode representation.

  • TSA SuspendTenant rules didn't respect the duration specified in the rule, instead defaulting to 5 minutes.

  • Suspensions didn't apply to every case where a message could enter the ready queue. We now check both as part of entering the ready queue and as a last moment check when a message is popped off the ready queue. We will now log a TransientFailure log record whenever a message matches a scheduled queue suspension. In addition, suspensions will now always respect the normal exponential backoff retry schedule instead of clumping together when the suspension expires. #290 #293

  • During a low memory condition, we'd only release the body and metadata memory if they had previously been saved, when the intent was that we should explicitly save it and then drop it. This meant that running with deferred-spooling or otherwise modifying the message or its metadata after reception could result in messages that wouldn't be eligible to shrink until after their next attempt. In addition, we could repeatedly try this each time the readyq maintainer would trigger during a memory shortage.

  • The requeue_message event was internally named message_requeued, contrary to the documentation. This has now been corrected. #236

  • The throttle_insert_ready_queue event was not correctly registered and would never trigger.

  • A MIME message rebuild could improperly re-encode unicode Subject lines into a series of quoted-printable encoded-words, causing spaces between those words to be effectively discarded when the subject is decoded. The header re-encoding will now prefer to re-assemble unstructured fields as a single encoded-word to avoid this.

  • Using msg:append_text_html() or msg:append_text_plain() on a mime part that had a pre-existing Content-Transfer-Encoding header wouldn't remove the header. If the original encoding was base64 and the new form of the part was written out in quoted-printable then the resulting mime part would be ambiguous to decode.

  • An error raised in a custom get_queue_config event handler during reception wouldn't remove the message from the spool, but would report a transient failure back to the injector, which could lead to it sending a message again.