Anti Virus for mail server

[Pat Lashley]

--On Friday, September 12, 2003 01:46:59 -0700 Marcus Reid 
<marcus at blazingdot.com> wrote:

> 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.

I've got a mostly FreeBSD/Solaris/MacOS X/Linux shop; and found it was
worth putting in virus checking just so we wouldn't have to wade through
the piles of sobig.f crap in our mailboxes.

> 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: ...
>
> sendmail: ...
>
> postfix: ...

This list really can't be considered to be anywhere near complete without
including Exim.  Particularly the latest versions with the exiscan-acl
patches.  Those not only allow you to integrate virus scanning and anti-
spam features into a powerful, flexible ACL; those ACLs let you reject
the offending message while the SMTP connection is still open.  (So no
undeliverable bounce messages clogging up your outgoing queues.)

(The FreeBSD mail/exim port automatically includes the exiscan-acl
patches.)

Exim is easy to configure, -very- flexible, and capable of handling
fairly large traffic levels if required.


I can also heartily recommend clamav as a virus scanner.  (Also
installable via a port.  As is SpamAssassin.)



-Pat