Anti Virus for mail server

[Ted Cabeen]

Marcus Reid <marcus at blazingdot.com> writes:

> 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.

The downside to Sophos is that it costs an arm and a leg, especially
for mail server use.  F-Prot used to charge on a per-server basis,
although I've heard some mention that they may have changed their
pricing for mail servers.

Is f-prot really that slow?  Back when we were running the
command-line scanner version, it seemed blisteringly fast.  I often
had difficulty even finding it in the process table with mails coming
in at a rate of 1 or 2 per second.  We've since switched to the
daemonized scanner, which is quite fast, especially with amavisd-new
which knows how to interact with the scanner directly, saving at least
one fork().  Even still, SpamAssassin processing is a least an order
of magnitude slower than any virus scanning, so it isn't a huge deal
either way.

-- 
Ted Cabeen           http://www.pobox.com/~secabeen            ted at impulse.net 
Check Website or Keyserver for PGP/GPG Key BA0349D2         secabeen at pobox.com
"I have taken all knowledge to be my province." -F. Bacon  secabeen at cabeen.org
"Human kind cannot bear very much reality."-T.S.Eliot        cabeen at netcom.com