pyzor-announce — announcements; recommended for all users

Brief downtime 19th November 2015 06:00 UTC

[Tony M. <to...@sp...>]

Hello,

A disk on the main public.pyzor.org server needs to be replaced (a different one than last time), so there will again be a short downtime of the public server, sorry.

The replacement is scheduled for the 19th of November 2015, 06:00 UTC, and should take no more than 30 minutes (likely about half of that).

We apologise for any inconvenience!

Regards,
Tony

Pyzor 1.0 Released

[Alexandru C. <chi...@gm...>]

The Pyzor team is pleased to announce release 1.0 of Pyzor.

You can get the new version and more information at http://pyzor.org. To
upgrade your installation simply use:

$ pip install --upgrade pyzor

Main changes in this release include:

=========
New features:

    * New pyzor commands ``local_[un]whitelist`` are available for managing
      a local whitelist on the client side.
    * New ``PreFork`` option for the pyzor server. This allows creating
multiple
      workers for handling pyzor requests.

Perfomance enhancements:

    * Improve usage of the Redis engine by using Hashes instead of string
for
      storing digests. The migration tool can be used to update you current
      database.

Others:

    * PyPy3 compatibility verified and introduced into the Travis-CI system.
    * Unification of the storage engines types.
    * Improved check on the public whitelisting request service to skip
sending
      requests to whitelist message that have not been reported to the
public
      database or have been already whitelisted.
=========

You can find full changelog here
<http://www.pyzor.org/en/release-1-0-0/changelog.html#pyzor-1-0-0>. Many
thanks to everybody who offered us feedback, bug reports and patches! Enjoy
the new release and good luck in the ongoing fight with spam :)

The Pyzor Team.

Pyzor 0.9 Released

[Alexandru C. <chi...@gm...>]

The Pyzor team is pleased to announce release 0.9 of Pyzor.

You can get the new version and more information at http://pyzor.org. To
upgrade your installation simply use:

$ pip install --upgrade pyzor

Main changes in this release include:

=========
Bug fixes:
        * Fix gdbm decoding issue.
        * Fix inconsistencies with accounts and addresses.

New features:
        * Strip content inside ``<style>`` and ``<script>`` tags during HTML
          normalization.
        * Improvements in Pyzor client error codes.
        * Add support for logging to Sentry.

Performance enhancements:
        * Do report and whitelist in a single step for MySQL Server Engine.

Others:
        * You can now requests whitelisting a message by using a simple form
          available at: http://public.pyzor.org/whitelist/
=========

You can find full changelog here
<http://www.pyzor.org/en/release-0-9-0/changelog.html#pyzor-0-9-0>. Many
thanks to everybody who offered us feedback, bug reports and patches! Enjoy
the new release and good luck in the ongoing fight with spam :)

The Pyzor Team.

Pyzor 0.8 Released

[Alexandru C. <chi...@gm...>]

The Pyzor team is pleased to announce release 0.8 of Pyzor.

You can get the new version and more information at http://pyzor.org. To
upgrade your installation simply use:

$ pip install --upgrade pyzor

Main changes in this release include:

=========
Bug fixes:
* Fix unicode decoding issues. (#1)

New features (Thanks to gryphius for helping out with these):
* A new option for the pyzor server to set-up digest forwarding.
* A new script pyzor-migrate is now available. The script allows migrating
your digest database from one engine to another. (#2)

Perfomance enhancements:
* Use multiple threads when connecting to multiple servers in the pyzor client
script. (#5)
* A new ``BatchClient`` is available in pyzor client API. The client now
send reports in batches to the pyzor server. (#13)
=========

You can find full changelog here
<http://www.pyzor.org/en/release-0-8-0/changelog.html#pyzor-0-8-0>. Many
thanks to everybody who offered us feedback, bug reports and patches! Enjoy
the new release and good luck in the ongoing fight with spam :)

The Pyzor Team.

Pyzor is now on Github

[Alexandru C. <chi...@gm...>]

As also discussed in the pyzor-users mailing-list, the Source Forge support
for Hosted Apps has been retired.
<http://sourceforge.net/p/forge/community-docs/Hosted%20Apps%20Retirement/> As
a result we started and successfully completed the migration of the Pyzor
project from SourceForge to Github. We are also now hosting our
documentation on readthedocs.org.

New locations:
 * Source code: https://github.com/SpamExperts/pyzor
 * Issue Tracker: https://github.com/SpamExperts/pyzor/issues
 * Documentation: http://www.pyzor.org

The project will still remain on SourceForge (with the proper deprecation
notice), but you can no longer open new tickets in the Trac. Existing
tickets have been migrated to new issues.

Please do continue to send us feed-back, bug reports, feature request but
you should now use the Github Issue Tracker. The mailing-lists will also
remain in place.

Kind Regards,
The Pyzor Team

Pyzor 0.7 Released

[Alexandru C. <chi...@gm...>]

The Pyzor team is pleased to announce release 0.7 of Pyzor.

You can get the new version and more information at http://pyzor.org. To
upgrade your installation simply use:

$ pip install --upgrade pyzor

We will also be continuing with this release schedule, new release coming
in about two more months. So please send us any bug or feature requests so
we can further improve Pyzor.

Main changes in this release include:

=========
Bug fixes:
    * Fix decoding bug when messages are badly formed
    * Pyzor now correctly creates the specified homedir, not the user's one

New features:
    * Logging is now disabled by default
    * Automatically run 2to3 during installation (if required)

New pyzord features:
    * Added ability to disable expiry
    * New redis engine support has been added
    * New option to enable gevent
    * Added the ability to reload accounts and access files using USR1
signal
    * Added the ability to safely stop the daemon with TERM signal
    * Split the usage-log and normal log in two separate files
    * Pyzord daemon can now daemonize and detach itself
=========

Many thanks to everybody who offered us feedback, bug reports and patches!
Enjoy the new release and good luck in the ongoing fight with spam :)

The Pyzor Team.

Pyzor is now available on PyPI

[Alexandru C. <chi...@gm...>]

We have successfully moved Pyzor releases to PyPI. Please visit
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyzor/0.6.1 for details.

This means that it is now easier to install/upgrade you pyzor installation
by using pip. For example:

*pip install pyzor*


or

*pip install --upgrade pyzor*


We are also announcing a new minor release 0.6.1 that includes two bug
fixes, which is now available on both
PyPI<https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyzor/0.6.1>and
SourceForge <https://sourceforge.net/projects/pyzor/files/pyzor/0.6.1/>:

* Resolved email decoding problem in the pyzor client
(#180<https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/pyzor/ticket/180>
)

* Resolved Python 2.6 incompatibility in the pyzord server
(#181<https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/pyzor/ticket/181>
)


Many thanks to the community for your reports and support.

The Pyzor Team.

Pyzor 0.6 Released

[Alexandru C. <chi...@gm...>]

The Pyzor team is pleased to announce release 0.6 of Pyzor.

You can get the new version and more information at http://pyzor.org

With this release we have increased the minimum version of Python required
to 2.6, and also added support for Python3.3. This release also brings new
features and performance improvements. The public server, public.pyzor.org,
has already been updated to the new version (don't worry everything is
still backwards compatible), and has been running with absolutely no
problems or downtime for about 4 weeks now.

We are also announcing that we will return to a system of regular releases,
so please send us any feedback/suggestions/bug reports.

Main changes include:

	*	pyzor and pyzord will now work with Python3.3 (if the the 2to3-3.3
is previously ran)

	*	pyzord and pyzor now supports IPv6

	*	Improved handling of multi-threading (signals where again removed)
for the MySQL engine
	
	* 	Introduced multi-processing capabilities

	* 	Improved HTML parsing
	
	*	Introduced self document sample configurations
	
	*	Introduced ability to set custom report/whitelist thresholds for
the pyzor client
	
	* 	Greatly improved tests coverage

Enjoy the new release and good luck in the ongoing fight with spam :)

The Pyzor Team.

Public server moved to PCextreme

[Dreas v. D. <dr...@sp...>]

Hi everyone!

To further increase the reliability of the public server, it has been 
moved to the infrastructure of PCextreme (http://www.pcextreme.nl/) who 
has been so kind to sponsor the required resources. The A record  of 
public.pyzor.org has been changed to point to the new location. No 
adjustments will be necessary on your side.

Kind regards,

Dreas van Donselaar

Important change regarding submitting bug reports and feature requests

[Tony M. <to...@sp...>]

Unfortunately, ever since the change from the old SourceForge ticket
system (which handles bug reports and feature requests) to the new
SourceForge-hosted Trac system, there have been a steady number of
spam tickets created.

Although it would be quite simple to detect these problem tickets
automatically (especially for an anti-spam project!), the hosted Trac
that SourceForge provides doesn't allow modifications like this.  That
means that currently the only solution is to manually close the
tickets.

Manually closing the tickets works, but the spam tickets are visible
for a short period of time (until a human has time to see and close
them), and since tickets cannot be deleted, they are always in the
system and will show up in reports and searches.

After discussion on the pyzor-users list, the only viable solution
appears to be to remove the ability for anonymous users to submit and
modify tickets.

This means that as of now, if you want to submit a bug report or
feature request for pyzor, you will need to log in to SourceForge to
do so.  You can use a SourceForge account, or any OpenID id to do
this.

We apologise for the inconvenience, and hope that this will not stop
anyone from submitting bugs, patches, and feature requests.  If you
can't or won't log in for some reason, then you can post your
information to the pyzor-users mailing list and I'll create the ticket
for you (but obviously I would prefer that you created it yourself).

Thanks,
Tony, on behalf of the pyzor team.

Pyzor website and bug/feature tracker changes

[Tony M. <to...@sp...>]

SourceForge is in the process of discontinuing their documentation
manager and tracker system, in favour of 'hosted applications' that do
the same task.  As a result, we've had to make some changes to the way
that you report and monitor bugs, patches, and feature requests for
Pyzor.  (We've done this a little in advance of the SourceForge
shut-down, so that we're not rushed into it).

The changes are:

 * Bug reports, patches, and feature requests will be managed via a
new system.  You can report a new bug, or open a new feature request,
by going to http://p.sf.net/pyzor/newticket and you can look at the
existing tickets by going to http://p.sf.net/pyzor/report/ .  You
should find this system as easy to use as the old SourceForge one, if
not easier.

 * Documentation has been moved to a wiki system - the big advantage
here is that anyone (with a SourceForge account) is able to contribute
by editing and creating pages.  You can find the documentation at
http://p.sf.net/pyzor/wiki

 * The http://pyzor.org address will take you to the front page of the
wiki, where you can easily find links to tickets, downloads, and other
documentation.

All of the old content has been migrated to this system, including all
closed bug reports, patches, and feature requests (dates of ticket
changes and submitter information has not been preserved, but can be
corrected once SourceForge officially drops the old system, if
required).  We'll continue to add more information (particularly
documentation) as time allows.

The new system uses the Trac management software, which is fairly
widely used, especially among projects implemented in Python, so
hopefully many of you are already familiar with the system.

We'd like to emphasise that the website, documentation, and tickets
are still hosted by SourceForge (just a different part), and that the
project is still completely open and welcomes contributions from the
community.  In fact, we hope that these changes make it easier to take
part.

Please let us know if you have any difficulties with the new site, or
have any suggestions!

--
Tony Meyer, on behalf of the Pyzor team.

Pyzor 0.5 Released

[Tony M. <to...@sp...>]

The Pyzor team is pleased to announce release 0.5 of Pyzor.

The previous release was made in September of 2002, so it has
obviously been a while!  With this release, we have aimed to resolve
all the outstanding reported bugs and incorporate submitted patches
(many of which are also from some time ago).  The hope is that this,
along with the recent improvements to the public Pyzor server,
revitalises the Pyzor project.

We are aiming to release the next version of Pyzor, which will include
new features, around the end of June (2009!).  If you'd like to have
input into that release, please subscribe to the pyzor-users mailing
list, or monitor the SourceForge tickets for the Pyzor project.  We
are very keen to have as much input from the user-base as possible.

The majority of the improvements in the 0.5 release were submitted
from the Debian Pyzor package.  Many thanks to them for pushing these
back 'upstream' - if you have any improvements that you are running
locally, please consider doing the same and contributing these as
patches to the main Pyzor package (open a ticket on the SourceForge
site).

Main changes include:

       *       Man pages for pyzor and pyzord.

       *       Changing back to signals for database locking,
               rather than threads.  It is likely that signals
               will be removed again in the future, but the
               existing threading changes caused problems.

       *       Basic checks on the results of "discover".

       *       Extended mbox support throughout the library.

       *       Better handling on unknown encodings.

       *       Added a --log option to log to a file.

       *       Better handling of command-line options.

       *       Improved error handling.

You can get the release (via the 'download' link on the left), as well
as information about the mailing lists and other news, at:

   http://pyzor.org

Enjoy the new release and your reduced spam mail :)

As always, thanks to everyone involved in this release!

Tony.
(on behalf of the Pyzor team)

--- What is Pyzor? ---

Pyzor is a collaborative, networked system to detect and block spam
using identifying digests of messages.

Pyzor initially started out to be merely a Python implementation of
Razor, but due to the protocol and the fact that Razor's server is not
Open Source or software libre, Frank Tobin decided to implement Pyzor
with a new protocol and release the entire system as Open Source and
software libre.

Since the entire system is released under the GPL, people are free to
host their own independent servers, although there is a
well-maintained public server available (public.pyzor.org), which
anyone is welcome to use.

New public Pyzor server

[Dreas v. D. <dr...@sp...>]

Hi,

Yesterday we have changed the public Pyzor server to a new machine on a 
new IP. The server has had some significant upgrades, and should better 
cope with the volume of requests.

Everybody that is already querying the hostname public.pyzor.org will 
not have to take any actions. If you are not using the public.pyzor.org 
hostname yet, please run "pyzor discover" to correctly set your pyzor 
client. To see what server you are currently using, you can simply run 
"pyzor ping".

If you experience any problems (e.g. timeouts, or the requests are still 
too slow) please do let us know via the 
pyz...@li... mailinglist.

Kind regards,

Dreas

Important Pyzor update

[Dreas v. D. <dr...@sp...>]

Hi,

I would like to inform you of several important updates regarding the
Pyzor project:

1. Please run "pyzor discover" and make sure your are using the new
hostname public.pyzor.org (run "pyzor ping") for your queries (instead
of directly querying the IP address 82.94.255.100).
2. The latest Pyzor sourcecode is now available from SVN
(https://sourceforge.net/svn/?group_id=50000) instead of CVS.
3. We are actively working on a new release of Pyzor (GPL of course!).
Please report any bugs that are not yet listed to
https://sourceforge.net/tracker2/?group_id=50000

If you have any questions, please submit a support request
(https://sourceforge.net/tracker2/?group_id=50000).

Thanks!

Regards,

Dreas van Donselaar
(I replaced the founding developer Frank Tobin as project admin,
SourceForge.net username "abyz12345")

updating the server list

[Frank T. <ft...@ne...>]

This is just a reminder that a couple months ago Pyzor started using a new 
server.  If you haven't run 'pyzor discover' (unless you're a new install 
since then), you're still pointing towards the old server, and are not 
getting responses from it.  Simply run 'pyzor discover' to grab the new 
list.  Yes, the next version of Pyzor will automatically poll every so 
often to alleviate this.  Thanks.

-- 
Frank

new pyzor server

[Frank T. <ft...@ne...>]

Hello everyone,

There is a new pyzor server that you need to point to now.  Simply run 
'pyzor discover' and your configuration will be updated.  Thanks.

Many thanks to Jason Buberel (http://www.buberel.org/) for being a 
long-time good host and system admin.

If you would lilke to host a pyzor server, please conact me off-list. 
The bandwidth requirements are about 25k each way, with a medium amount of 
CPU usage.

-- 
Frank

new pyzor server

[Frank T. <ft...@ne...>]

One of the pyzor servers is going away over the next 24 hours; if you 
simply run 'pyzor discover' now you should be in good shape, as you'll 
start pointing to the new server that is already up.

-- 
Frank Tobin

new pyzor host

[Frank T. <ft...@ne...>]

The current pyzor host went down earlier today, and the sysadmin is
unfortunately unavailable, so I've moved it to a new host, courtesy of
Brent Holmes.

Simply run 'pyzor discover' and all will be good.

-- 
Frank Tobin			http://www.neverending.org/~ftobin/

Re: pyzor server address change

[Frank T. <ft...@ne...>]

Frank Tobin, on 2003-06-13, wrote:

> Between 18:00-19:00 PST tonight, the pyzor server address will change;  
> when the change occurs, you'll need to re-run 'pyzor discover' to find the
> new server.

The server list has been updated, so please now run 'pyzor discover'.

-- 
Frank Tobin			http://www.neverending.org/~ftobin/

pyzor server address change

[Frank T. <ft...@ne...>]

Between 18:00-19:00 PST tonight, the pyzor server address will change;  
when the change occurs, you'll need to re-run 'pyzor discover' to find the
new server.

-- 
Frank Tobin			http://www.neverending.org/~ftobin/

pyzor server is down for a few hours

[Frank T. <ft...@ne...>]

The pyzor server has been taken down for a few hours while the host
undergoes an OS upgrade.  According to estimates, it should be back before
09:00 GMT.

-- 
Frank Tobin			http://www.neverending.org/~ftobin/

old pyzor server going away

[Frank T. <ft...@ne...>]

The old pyzor server at 167.206.208.233:24442 is going away in about 4
hours (06:00 UTC). The timetable for disconnecting it has unfortunately
been accelerated.

If you haven't already, please run 'pyzor discover' to find the new public
server.

I've learned that the next version of pyzor needs to have a redirection
system, to handle these sorts of changes.

-- 
Frank Tobin			http://www.neverending.org/~ftobin/

public server changed

[Frank T. <ft...@ne...>]

The public server is being migrated to a new box.  The database has been
copied over, and the inform-url has changed.  Please run 'pyzor discover'
to pull in where the new server is.

Special thanks to Jason L. Buberel (jason at buberel.org) for providing an
account to host the server on.

Please let me know if there are significant issues using this new server.
I don't expect there to be any.

The old server located at 167.206.208.232:24442 is likely to go within a
week, possibly within 4 days.  Sorry for the short notice, but there are
many issues involved.

-- 
Frank Tobin			http://www.neverending.org/~ftobin/

new server host found

[Frank T. <ft...@ne...>]

Thank you to all those that responded to my request to find an new unix
account where I could host the pyzor server.  I've contacted one of the
respondents privately, and hopefully I'll be able to make the transition
shortly.  I'll announce to the lists before this happens, of course.  All
that will have to be done is to re-run 'pyzor discover'.  Unfortunately,
the current version of pyzor doesn't hint or automatically re-run
pyzor-discover for you, so this will have to be done manually.

When this happens, I'll leave the current server running until it drops
off, but of course, that will divide the database into two locations, so
pyzor's effectiveness will likely be impaired until we get the majority of
spam-reporting users using the new server.

For those that offered service but I didn't repond to you personally, I
thank you for your offers.  Assuming all goes well with the prospective
new host, I shan't be needing the assistance.

-- 
Frank Tobin			http://www.neverending.org/~ftobin/

Looking for new public server host

[Frank T. <ft...@ne...>]

The hosting in which the box the current Pyzor public server runs on has
become unsound, and it's likely that within one or two months that its
ability to serve will end.  I'm looking a volunteer to provide a unix
environment for a replacement Pyzor server within the span of a month, for
a currently indeterminate period of time (think 6-12 months).

Requirements:
*) high uptime/availability
*) Unix environment
*) ssh shell access for me to maintain the daemon
*) Python 2.2.1 or later
*) ~4 KB/s continual bandwidth use (varies; often less)
*) good latency
*) 100 MB of space for development and production use (mainly for 
   rotated log files)
*) ability to listen and transmit on a high UDP port (e.g, 24441, 24442)
*) emacs :)

Note: CPU and memory usage are largely a non-issue.  Resident memory usage
is about 3 MB and CPU usage is under 1% of a p200.

Please contact me off-list if you feel you can provide these services and
wish to help in keeping Pyzor alive.

-- 
Frank Tobin			http://www.neverending.org/~ftobin/