FOSS border system for Zimbra - mxHero

[bcsantos]

We’re launching today an SMTP border system, called mxHero. Being Zimbra partners we’ve basically tailored it to Zimbra.

At the moment it has a few interesting features that will enhance your Zimbra deployment. Beyond pretty real time statistics, admins can limit to whom users can send, receive. You can also copy, redirect or use any of the other 12 included plugins.

At the moment it is being distributed as a Virtual Appliance. It’s been tested for several months now - on more than 5000 email accounts.

It is the result of a year and a half of hard work. License is GPLv3. Enjoy and feedback!

Site here: mxHero - email better

[Krishopper]

Hello,

That looks very interesting. Would you mind sharing your motivation behind creating this product? What problem(s) were you trying to solve by creating it?

[bcsantos]

Absolutely! As part of another company, I have been in the email hosting business for more than 10 years. Often we would hear clients asking for some of the features that we've put into mxHero. A lot of them were simple, like being able to limit to whom certain users can send email. The case was a large super market chain. But other than purpose built software, there was nothing easily accessible.

Also, most email systems lack nice, graphical statistics (not to mention realtime). Or some place you can profile what is going on in the email stream, like who is sending the most email, who is receiving the most, etc. Most admins have no idea what is going on regarding message flows.

These needs are real. We have been testing the market with a few companies and their response (and of their clients) has been very positive.

Needless to say we have a large roadmap, more than 70+ additional features coming. So hopefully we'll have a few things anyone will find useful.

Cheers!

[Klug]

Sounds excellent, will try this this week!

Do you have a forum in order to exchange on this?
I saw you (not this project's) forum but it seems to be brezilian speaking only.

[bcsantos]

Yes, we are using the forum at source forge (SourceForge.net: mxHero - Support). Otherwise you can find existing documentation via our site mxHero - email better.

Cheers

[blazeking]

Anyone trying this have trouble loading the VM? I'm running ESXi, and the download listed here (Download - mxHero) is a compressed vmdk file, which should be a HDD file. My ESXi install (4.1) does not recognize it as a virtual disk.

[bcsantos]

Originally Posted by blazeking

Anyone trying this have trouble loading the VM? I'm running ESXi, and the download listed here (Download - mxHero) is a compressed vmdk file, which should be a HDD file. My ESXi install (4.1) does not recognize it as a virtual disk.

Please check this document: http://wiki.mxhero.com:8080/display/...tual+Appliance

VMware ESX installation tip
If you are are installing on ESX and are not able to 'play' the VM you might need to convert the disk (substituting parameters to your specific case):

vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/mxhero-old.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/mxhero-new.vmdk

Then remove the old disk from the VM and add the new one.

[blazeking]

Originally Posted by bcsantos

Please check this document: http://wiki.mxhero.com:8080/display/...tual+Appliance

Thank you for the quick reply. Still get an error:

vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/4e24b6aa-2e0f457e-48c8-0019b9d9563a/mxHero-VA32-vmdk-1.0.0.RELEASE /vmfs/volumes/4e24b6aa-2e0f457e-48c8-0019b9d9563a/mxhero.vmdk

DiskLib_Check() failed for source disk The file specified is not a virtual disk (15).

[bcsantos]

The download file is a bzip2 tarball that needs to be extracted. It will create a directory with .vmx and .vmdk files. The content of this directory must be deployed on a VMware Server or ESXi datastore, and added to VM inventory. Did you execute these steps?

[ccelis5215]

C´mon .....

We the Zimbra users don´t need this kind of stuff.