Mail anti-virus scanner recommendations ?

[Bengt Thuree]

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Juan Nin wrote:
> Bengt Thuree wrote:
> 
>>> it's true mailscanner didn't have a good integration with postfix, and
>>> they way ot managed to work with it was not good, so there was chance of
>>> losing mail, and the postfix community  didn't support it nor recommend
>>> it.. I believe it was later solved, but I'm not sure..
>>>
>>
>> It is fixed now...
> 
> 
> mmhhhh...
> at http://www.postfix.org/addon.html it says:
> 
> mailscanner system, works with Postfix and other MTAs. This uses
> unsupported methods to manipulate Postfix queue files, and there are
> multiple reports of message duplication and/or delivery of truncated
> messages.
> 
This is with the previous solution of having two Postfix deamons
running. The current one is using only one Postfix daemon and the more
standard way.
This was discovered/released/discussed late last year...
For more information check this link
http://www.sng.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailscanner/serve/cache/382.html
In short
> Recently however some changes have been made to allow for a different approach. This new approach does not require Mailscanner to access the active queue. Nor does it require Postfix to be split into two instances. It is still however acessing the Postfix queue but not the active queue, thats the key. Now Instead Postfix puts all incoming email into a hold queue for scanning. By putting a simple line into the Postfix /etc/Postfix/header_checks file (explained here http://www.sng.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Mailscanner/install/Postfix.shtml) all email is put into the hold queue where from what has been explained to me, this is a safe quiet place that Postfix is no longer actively accessing or changing. Its basically frozen in the process as far as Postfix is concerned. As stated in the man pages for the qmgr: hold = Messages that are kept "on hold" are kept here until someone sets them free (also see man header_checks). Now Mailscanner can safely access these emails in the Postfix hold 
queue for scanning and then pass it back into Postfix active queue for delivery. To me and a lot of other people this makes perfect sense. This is much simpler approach and takes far less resources and time than to have Mailscanner running its own SMTP engine just so it can talk to Postfix. But the Postfix community and possibly even the developers are still insisting that Mailscanner is not a viable AV scanner for Postfix systems. Respectively, if this is still the case then the Postfix developers need to say something so other solutions can be worked out. The idea behind putting the incoming emails into the hold queue for scanning has eliminated all of the risks that were associated with using Mailscanner and Postfix together in the past. The Postfix website is still insisting that Mailscanner is a risk http://www.Postfix.org/addon.html. With the new single instance Postfix setup configuration, I have not seen any proof that would lead me to believe that any problems may ar
ise. After 2 months of using Mailscanner with postfix in the single instance setup design I have not experienced any problems.

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