replace amavisd-new with mailscanner in main and in documentation

[Scott Kitterman]

"James Dinkel" <jdinkel at gmail.com> wrote:

>The subject pretty much says it.  I've been doing a lot of reading and
>testing with both and mailscanner seems to be much easier to use.  They both
>have fairly equal feature-sets all though MailWatcher for mailscanner is
>pretty awesome and I see no equivalent for amavisd-new.  I also hear
>mailscanner has better performance, and after reviewing the architectures of
>both I would expect mailscanner to have better performance.  Mailscanner's
>method of getting the emails from postfix and injecting back in to postfix
>makes more sense and takes advantage of a feature in postfix designed to
>allow scanning of emails.  From what I see on the 'net, mailscanner also
>seems to be much more popular (as I would expect).  So I was surprised to
>see amavisd-new in the official Ubuntu Server documentation.  Mailscanner
>seems to be the more likely choice to get the nod of approval from the
>server team.  I'm guessing this has something to do with a problem between
>mailscanner and postfix in the past, however, without going in to details,
>that problem has been fixed thanks to a feature added to postfix (the above
>mentioned feature about scanning of emails).
>
>Thanks for any consideration.
>
The problem wasn't "between mailscanner and postfix". The problem was mailscanner using internal postfix interfaces to extract and inject mail. From a software engineering perspective this is insane. The mailscanner developers have characterized this as a "political" problem. 

Personally, I'm more than slightly skeptical about software developed by people who exhibit such a fundamental lack of understanding of basic software engineering principles. 

Amavisd-new is also what upstream (postfix) recommends.

I'm willing to consider alternatives, but I'd want to have a clear understanding of the architectural implications as well as any other advantages/disadvantages.

I have not followed mailscanner development. If you could provide some technical details on what's changed, that would be a good start. 

Scott K