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Can you share your impressions after upgrading from old to new SmarterMail (please specify builds!)?

Question asked by Gabriele Maoret - SERSIS - 6/5/2023 at 1:18 AM

Unanswered

Hi all!

After long waits and doubts given the problems reported with the first builds, I finally made up my mind and on June 2nd I updated our biggest cloud server where some hundreds of external customers are connected (at the moment there are 187 different domains with a bit more than 900 users...).

In my case I boldly went straight from the old build 8451 to the very latest build 8552.

First impressions are good and it seems to me that everything is more or less working (although everything will certainly be better tested in the months to come...).

However, I have to make some observations (although some have already been reported by other users...):

even a few days after the upgrade, an increased CPU usage continues to occur, which remains quite constantly above 15% with peaks of even 80% (while before it almost always remained below 5-10% with maximum peaks of 30-40 %)
the "simplification" of the IDS Rules (which saw the unification of the rules that were previously separated by protocols), in my opinion, has led to more "false positives" in the blocks of IP and user emails, causing an increased request for unlocking by the users themselves.
This led me to "relax" the rules a bit compared to the old version.
So, again in my opinion, this was a worsening...
I quite like the new interface, but in my opinion some things have been missed.
For example, there is no longer the check if our server has ended up in some blacklist.
Or again (already reported): in the Domains --> Accounts screen, the overview that made it easy to understand which users are consuming EAS licenses has been lost. Sure, you can see them in other screens, but it was nice to have everything in the same place...
Again: there is no longer the screen that reported users who have been inactive for a certain period of time (although in fact this works badly even in the old version...).
[ADDED]
I'm seeing a big increase in RAM consumption over the old 8451 version.
With the old 8451 my SmarterMail used an average of 4 to 12 GB of RAM.
With the new version 8552 the average usage has increased and now SmarterMail uses about 10-25 GB of RAM (ie about double).

[EDIT]

My SmarterMail Server is a HyperV VM on a big server with AMD EPYC 7313 CPU.

Previously with the old SM 8451 the VM was set to use 8 vCPU and MAX 32GB of dynamic memory.

To overcome the problems due to the increased resource demand of the new SM 8552 I modified my VM configuration to have 32 vCPU and MAX 64 GB of dynamic memory.

...but sometimes I see over 90% CPU still...

These are my first impressions!

I will not fail to point out other things that will come to mind, perhaps by updating this post...

So the question is: what are your impressions and feedbacks after upgrading?

Gabriele Maoret - Head of SysAdmins and CISO at SERSIS

Currently manages 7 SmarterMail installations (1 in the cloud for SERSIS which provides services to a few hundred third-party email domains + 6 on-premise for customers who prefer to have their mail server in-house)

17 Replies

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Brian Replied

6/5/2023 at 2:10 AM

There is a lot of clicking in the UX and I miss some things from Mailenable.

IN Mailenable you could track all emails to one specific user and then click on an email to trace its logs in SMTP and see what has happened to it. It made it very easy to see if it was marked as spam or something else. The first one is just the overall layout of the admin console.

When you track a message from a specific user or to a specific user then its super simple and instead of searching through logs the console does it for you and you can backtrace through SMTP logs. I miss that a lot when a client calls and tells me that he is expecting an email but havent received it yet.

Gabriele Maoret - SERSIS Replied

6/5/2023 at 4:37 AM

Sorry Brian, but the second part of yours seems to be more of a "feature request" than an impression on the difference between "old smartermail" and "new smartermail".

This is not the purpose of this post, maybe it's better if you move your request to your post here:

https://portal.smartertools.com/community/a95403/what-would-you-like-to-see-in-upcoming-sm-releases.aspx

P.S.: I was also a Mailenable user before switching to SmarterMail (which in my opinion is much superior...), and I too miss the MailTracking functionality a lot...

Gabriele Maoret - Head of SysAdmins and CISO at SERSIS

Brian Replied

6/5/2023 at 6:01 AM

Sorry Gabriele. I saw that afterwards :)

Gabriele Maoret - SERSIS Replied

6/5/2023 at 6:33 AM

No problem! ;)

Gabriele Maoret - Head of SysAdmins and CISO at SERSIS

Webio Replied

6/6/2023 at 12:22 PM

On my end I can say that unread messages are not so clearly visible when comparing them to already read.

I'm wondering how icons on the left of message are generated. Does only domain.com/favicion.ico/png/etc is checked or maybe HTML header is being also parsed for favicon image or maybe other way of getting domain image file.

I would also like to have possibility whitelist and show images in webmail not only from sender email address but also from sender domain name (this is how it is being done in Thunderbird: show images, show images from sender, show images from sender domain name).

Rafael Grecco Replied

6/7/2023 at 6:22 AM

Hi. I upgraded from 8451 to 8545 a week ago. It's been seven days without any serious issue, but I started to have one problem that I never had before.

This server has 4500 users. It's a governmental instituition, so because of some internal rules I cannot use a relay to send e-mails out (I cannot filter outgoing e-mails with a antispam server). So I use throttling to prevent cases where infected accoutns could send hundreds or thousands of e-mails.

This server has been running since 2018 and I've been using throttling since then. On this recent update several accounts started to get throttled for outgoing messages, but I did not change any rule and the number of outgoing messages has not changed.

Is anyone else having a similar problem? When I check the logs or the archive to check how many messages were sent, it shows that it never actually met the "Outbound Messages per Hour" limit. Could this be a bug or has the throttling rules been changed?

Gabriele Maoret - SERSIS Replied

6/7/2023 at 6:53 AM

Hello to all!!!

I've edited my comment at the top of this post by adding a fourth point to the list of things that are, in my opinion, worse in the new version of SmarterMail 8552: basically I'm seeing a big increase in RAM consumption compared to the old 8451 version.

I want to point out that no changes have been made regarding users or the system, therefore the increased use of resources (both CPU and RAM) is due only to the new version of SmarterMail.

Gabriele Maoret - Head of SysAdmins and CISO at SERSIS

Gabriele Maoret - SERSIS Replied

6/7/2023 at 7:00 AM

Hi Rafael!

At the moment I have never noticed that I have this kind of problem that you are reporting...

But now that you've pointed it out, I'll be careful too and if I notice anything strange about it I'll let you know.

Gabriele Maoret - Head of SysAdmins and CISO at SERSIS

Onionboy * Replied

6/12/2023 at 11:21 AM

I agree with Webio, it is very difficult to tell the difference between read and unread email in the current version. This week I was upgraded from something like ver 15.7.6855 (Oct 8, 2018) to build 8545 (May 25, 2023). The difference in color between read and unread email is literally really dark grey vs somewhat dark grey. It is very frustrating to do the most basic feature in an email client: find and read my unread email.

I know this is moving into the territory of a feature request, but couldn't we have some selectable options, like a brighter color for unread mail, and a washed-out light grey for read mail?

Unfortunately, my hosting company only updates SmarterMail about once every 5 years, so even if you fix this issue in a new release, I won't see it for many years. I guess it is time to move to a different hosting company and a different email platform.

echoDreamz Replied

6/13/2023 at 11:43 AM

We've received over 2 dozen tickets about the read/unread being difficult to distinguish, mainly with the dark theme. Hopefully ST can do something for this.

Manuel Martins Replied

6/13/2023 at 2:18 PM

Hi,

We have upgrade to the new SM eight days ago and since the upgrade we see a high increase of Disk usage, I don't know what SM is doing but the webmail interface is very, very slow comparing to the old version.

Can anyone explain what SM is doing reading the .grp files and when it is going to slow down ?

We have almost 11TB of ocupied space with SM files.

Thanks.

Matt Petty Replied

6/13/2023 at 2:34 PM

Employee Post

@Manuel

"

Everyone will see a jump a bit after their first update to these versions as we have a background process that will revisit every GRP file for each user. We do this because there is some additional information the CFG now stores, such as "HasCalendarItem" for example. This process happens in the background after a user is loaded for the first time, it happens in the background without interrupting the user but it does put load on the server. This only occurs once per user after the update to one of our recent versions, so after a couple days you should no longer see this.

This background process uses a maximum of 5 threads (on a 8 thread machine that's half your CPU). This process will also cause us to use more RAM than normal because we cache items that are recently loaded, and if were loading everything a user has we're technically caching quite a bit.

This process I'd expect large servers to finish in a day or 2 with some users being trickle updated throughout the week as they log in for the first time. User's with mobile devices will hit the server first and be visited first. I know there are other CPU/Mem concerns and we are looking a profiles as we get them. Hopefully this helps explain what the initial jump could be after upgrading in some scenarios. If you have been running for week+ on the current update it very likely that this ISNT what your seeing, but if you recently updated likely IS what you are seeing.

EDIT: You can adjust mailbox_subversion_upgrader_thread_count in your server's settings.json if you wish to speed up or slow down this process, though it still requires your users to be touched (they login, they receive an email, etc) before they upgrade.

(my response from https://portal.smartertools.com/community/a95316/how-many-have-upgraded.aspx)

Matt Petty

Senior Software Developer

SmarterTools Inc.

www.smartertools.com

Manuel Martins Replied

6/13/2023 at 2:55 PM

Thanks @Matt

Merle Wait Replied

7/20/2023 at 4:07 AM

Is distinguishing between the read and un-read, still an issue?

Rick Ryan Replied

7/23/2023 at 2:17 PM

Small server, but wasn't happy to find archiving turned off. Took several days before I found that it had been turned off for the entire server.

Jay Dubb Replied

7/24/2023 at 11:21 AM

@Matt Perry, if we reduce the number of threads, aside from slowing down the process, how specifically will it impact end users? Will they be lacking features or anything else until the one-time conversion process is performed on their mailbox?

Our SM server is dedicated to Smartermail only and has no other function. It has 26 Xeon CPU cores and 96 GB of RAM. Under normal daily operation it sustains 50% CPU(*) and 65-70 GB RAM, so we're deeply concerned how this post-upgrade process will impact us operationally.

(*) Down to 50% from 65-70% sustained, after turning off all RBLs and virus scans, since there's a filtering server in front of it.

Kyle Kerst Replied

7/24/2023 at 3:35 PM

Employee Post

@Jay Dubb - We definitely don't want you running into issues there and I reached out to your team directly via a support ticket to see about helping you guys profile an upgrade to our latest release to identify and resolve any issues you might encounter when you do get the upgrade started. Unfortunately it sounds like hardware won't allow for this currently.

So, I'd like to work with you guys to see if we can find anything (resolvable) we can do to reduce your current memory usage and hopefully free up some space for upgrade testing? If you're open to letting me look things over please let me know and I'd be happy to see if we can help smooth things out and make room for more testing! Thanks Jay!

Kyle Kerst

Lead Internal Network/System Administrator

SmarterTools Inc.

smartertools.com

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