Anti Virus for mail server

[Marcus Reid]

On Mon, Sep 08, 2003 at 05:15:21PM +0200, James Godwin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> There has been no need for Anti Virus on our mail servers as most of our
> clients are Mac users and our windows clients have anti virus installed on
> their machines.
> 
> Keeping windows virus updated updated is a mission so I was wondering what
> the ideal Anti Virus app I should use for our Sendmail and Qmail servers?
> 
> Any ideas would be much appreciated.

To answer your question, I would check out Sophos antivirus running under
sophie. I have found it to be ~10x faster than f-prot (standalone, not the
daemonized scanner which may be faster) in an email content filter.

To try and convert you to postfix:

I've spent a lot of time with qmail/qmail-scanner, sendmail/mailscanner,
and postfix/amavisd-new. Of these, here are my personal findings:

qmail: Excellent, flexible, reliable system. Best if all you want is
       a mechanism for transferring rfc2822 messages over SMTP. However,
       once you want fancy functionality like TLS and smtp-auth and
       spam/virus filtering and other spam tactics, qmail starts looking
       a little stiff. I was a qmail buff for years and still use it for
       machines that just need plain-jane MTAs.

sendmail: Ugh. Sheer pain. A misbehaving beast that should be put onto a
          rocket and launched into the sun.

postfix: Excellent, powerful MTA. I've found it to perform gracefully
         under pressure, very efficient, good architecture, good ability
         to clean up when spammers make a mess of you, good content
         filtering, and a big bag of tricks for taming email in a
         world full of resource stealing spammers. My current choice
         for machines that have to handle a lot of email and do things
         with it. My only complaint is that I like qmail's configuration
         better. But postfix config was influenced by Sendmail (see above.)
         so I forgive it. Oh, and the postfix-users mailing list has
         almost as much traffic as freebsd-questions, with Weitese himself
         joining in almost every meaningful discussion.

Ok, I'll stop now.

Marcus