Updated 23:00gmt Feb 24th:

I wanted to let you know that we’ve decided to delay the 8.0 release of the Symantec Brightmail Gateway.
For those of you who have been following the release closely or were involved in the beta, you’ll know that the plan up until last night was to release the new version today.  As you may also know, in the last year we’ve expanded our quality assurance processes to include a fairly lengthy and diverse set of persistence tests.  
One of our persistence machines hung last night after having run successfully for an extremely significant period of time.  
This machine was using a particularly brutal corpus of large files with a number of nested files.  So, having discovered this so late in the day, we’ve decided to hold the release until we find a resolution for this issue.
It is worth noting that we have processed over 120 million messages worldwide with the beta1 and beta2 releases and have not seen any hangs in the release, nor have we seen any critical issues (including crashes) in the beta2 release. 

We currently have no reason to expect that this hang would in fact occur in real world processing, but we can’t in good conscience release until I can tell you that for sure.
Our talented Engineering team are investigating with utmost urgency and I hope to update this post soon.

//ian

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This is a real milestone release for us on the Brightmail team and coming off the back of a first class beta period, we're sure that you guys are going to really see the benefit of new technology like:

* New MTA architecture gives big performance increase (76% over SBG 7.7, 185% over SBG 7.6 and a huge 196% over 7.5).
* 3rd Generation global reputation and Adaptive Reputation Management - Blocking ~90-96% of spam at connection time whilst preserving our super-low False Positive rate.

I posted an intro to the MTA changes to the blog (link below) and will shortly be putting up some details on Adaptive Reputation Management.

We're all really keen to see this go out and knowing the really quick uptake rate for new releases amongst our customers, we're excited to hear what you think!  Let us know by Twitter (http://twitter.com/brightmail) or by email to ian_mcshane@symantec.com.

I'll finish off with my favourite quote from our beta testing community.

"It is very clear that the new reputation system is really a lot more efficient than the old one, this is really a huge advantage. I think that with the new version we only process half the number of messages [at content time] than with the 7.7 release."

//ia