Mailbaby Feature Update: Released and upcoming: Faster Logins, Smarter Traps, and New Verification

At Mailbaby, we are constantly working to improve our service’s speed, reliability, and security. Here’s a look at some new features we’ve just released and what’s just around the corner.

Now live in production:

Faster SMTP Logins: We’ve implemented a new auth cache for SMTP lookups. This significantly speeds up the authentication process, getting your messages delivered faster.

Resilient Rspamd Scanning: While rare, a spam scan can sometimes fail or time out. Our system now temporarily stores the email to perform an automatic re-scan on a different scanning system, ensuring your legitimate mail always gets through.

A Large-Scale Spam Trap Network: A common spam tactic involves using automated tools to abuse website contact and user sign-up forms, effectively turning them into open relays. To combat this, we’ve built an extensive network of hundreds of fake sign-up forms that act as traps. These traps help us identify and flag malicious content and IPs before they become a problem for our users. Treat your user sign-up forms with the same security as an open relay. Just because an email is a “sign-up confirmation” doesn’t mean it can’t be reported as spam.

Coming Soon

Infrastructure Upgrade to FreeBSD 14: We are upgrading our servers from FreeBSD 13 to the new FreeBSD 14 release. This is an incremental update to our backbone, bringing enhanced performance and security. Don’t worry—due to our load-balanced and high-availability architecture, these updates will not cause any service interruptions.

Freebsd14 brings:
* Improved TCP Performance (CUBIC): FreeBSD 14 now uses CUBIC as the default TCP congestion control algorithm.
* Faster Encryption (Kernel TLS): The kernel now includes receive offload support for TLS 1.3.
* Storage & Filesystem Upgrades: The base system now includes OpenZFS 2.2.
* General Performance & Security: The new release includes many under-the-hood performance tweaks including improved VFS namecache, which speeds up file lookups—critical for mail queues and security defaults like ASLR and PIE enabled by default.

Flexible Domain Verification (Alternative to Origin SPF): Currently, Mailbaby verifies your domain’s authorization on the fly using your origin IP and its SPF record. We are introducing a new, more flexible method by user request. Soon, you will be able to authorize your domain by adding a simple TXT record, even if you don’t have an origin SPF record. The new format will be:

_mailbaby IN TXT “v=1 user=mbXXXXXX” We will support up to five user= records within a single TXT record. The v=1 version tag is included to allow for future extensions to this feature. This new verification method is being rolled out to production and will be fully available within the next 30 days and is being added to systems as the freebsd 13 -> 14 change over is done.