GNU Anubis releases 4.1
The GNU Anubis
team have just released version 4.1 of their excellent SMTP
application proxy.
Anubis sits between your mail user agent (MUA) and mail
transport agent (MTA), providing a convenient location to re-write
aspects of the SMTP message. Basically, if your MUA can't do
something, Anubis will patch up the differences before your message
hits the server.
Some examples of usage :-
- Rewriting From: addresses
-
- e.g. Anubis will force your
From: address to match based on the To: field, so you can always
send email to a list with the correct/unique subscribed
address.
- Providing encryption and
authentication
-
- Anubis will establish SSL TLS
and login authentication in both directions.
-
- Perhaps your SMTP provider
requires Auth, but your MUA can't support it – just route your
email via Anubis, and it will provide onwards credentials.
- Alternatively, the MTA doesn't
support encryption, but you need to use it in order to submit from
the MUA – Anubis will authenticate the MUA connection against a
local database, and then send your data onwards (ideally to an MTA
on the same server as Anubis, or at least within the same secure
network)
- Automate GPG encryption
-
- Give the Anubis server a
collection of GPG public keys, and it will be able to encrypt email
for onward delivery. Give it private keys, and it can sign messages
for you … (preferably after Auth, please!)
- The horrible disclaimer
signature
-
- Yes, Anubis can cram those
useless and legally void disclaimers into your messages. Don't tell
the pointy-haired bosses …
While most MUAs these days can support the strange machinations
we need, not all get it right. And you need to remember that most
of the interesting email is sent by automated processes –
subversion checkins, apt-get updates and other sysadminy
scripts. These may all deserve intelligent protection, and
providing it “invisibly” within the SMTP stream from Anubis reduces
the number of local modifications your system needs …