Some of you have undoubtedly noticed this already but cPanel 11.50 has finally arrived. We’ve been testing it for quite some time now and have waited to roll out updates across our servers until we were able to thoroughly test some of the new functionality and make sure that all remaining issues had been addressed. At this point we have updated all of our own servers and client dedicated servers. We hope to begin updating all shared and reseller hosting servers next week. The most obvious change that you’ll see right away is the design of the cPanel, WHM, and webmail login pages.
Along with the login pages you’ll also see a new look once logged into WHM and an updated header on the Paper Lantern cPanel theme. Going forward we will begin migrating accounts to the Paper Lantern cPanel theme as X3 is retired. If you make use of cPanel’s branding for the X3 theme you’ll want to take a look at the options available to you for Paper Lantern so that you are prepared for this change.
cPanel 11.50 also brings some fairly important behind the scenes changes. The biggest of these is the migration of Horde data from a shared SQL database to localized SQLite databases stored in each account’s home directory. If you are a heavy Horde user you may notice an increase in overall disk usage on the cPanel account as a result of this change since this data will now be stored there.
Lastly this update brings full support for greylisting to cPanel servers. Greylisting can be a great tool for eliminating spam in many cases and we will be gradually deploying it on all servers by default. You will have the option of disabling it via cPanel if so desired. We’ve been utilizing it on our SpamTitan cluster with great success.
Greylisting works by temporarily delaying messages from unrecognized senders for a short period of time, 5 minutes in our case. A legitimate sending server will automatically re-attempt delivery at which point the message will then be accepted and the sender combination remembered so that no further messages from them are delayed. This process will occur for each new sender combination but remembered such that it does only happen once. A lot of spam is sent in such a way that re-delivery attempts are never made, thus making greylisting a good option at eliminating it. We’ll be posting a follow-up on the results in a few months. If you have any questions meanwhile please don’t hesitate to contact us!