a Mail virus Scanner (was Re: test)

[Chris Ricker]

On Wed, 28 Jan 2004, shrek-m at gmx.de wrote:

> than i  *could*  say  "postfix is a no-go"  because i had lost emails 
> with postfix, but i don´t.
> i should mention that this happened on a system "without mailscanner"

There's a difference between "possible to lose mail" and "guaranteed to lose 
mail". Postfix + mailscanner is the latter. Any MTA is the former.

> >>>amavisd-new, OTOH, works with all the MTAs in fedora.
> >>>
> 
> amavisd-new    or do you mean
> amavis, amavisd, amavis-ng  ?

No, I meant amavisd-new. <http://www.ijs.si/software/amavisd/>

> >I'm not, because I don't use it. How do you know you haven't lost mails,
> >though? ;-)
> >  
> >
> 
> you don´t use it but you know that this is the case?

Yes.

> at least for  sendmail/mailscanner  i can *assure* you that i have lost 
> absolutely no mail.

sendmail / mailscanner != postfix/mailscanner

mailscanner is safe to use with sendmail, but not with postfix

> for postfix:
> http://www.sng.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailscanner/install/postfix.shtml
> afair  exists a patch for the last beta.
> 
> >At any rate, look through the postfix archives. Wietse rants periodically
> >about how / why mailscanner isn't safe with Postfix.
> >
> 
> > Earlier this month he posted a long list of how it would need to be re-architected to work
> >safely....
> >
> for  postfix or mailscanner ;-)
> 
> additional he could perhaps send this "long list" to  "julian field"

mailscanner directly manipulates postfix queue files. This isn't supported
on postfix, and will lose mail, and is explicitly advertised by the author
of postfix as "do not do this unless you want to lose mail." mailscanner
does it with postfix anyway, instead of using postfix's safe published
interfaces (as things like amavisd-new do).  Draw your own conclusions.

later,
chris