Stopping MailScanner on a per user basis ...

[Barnaby Brown]

On Wed, Oct 02, 2002 at 07:04:46PM +0100, Julian Field wrote:
> At 18:26 02/10/2002, you wrote:
> >Is there a way to have MailScanner skip users that have requested that
> >none of
> >their emails be checked for viruses or spam?
>
> The best to solve this problem is by making an institution policy that all
> email will be scanned.
> It's all very well, but how do you know that the people who are not having
> their mail scanned are not forwarding mail internally to other people? It's
> about the easiest way to let viruses in to your organisation!

Depends on your whole definition of 'organisation', really. As an ISP,
we have a fair few users, and only extend scanning to some of them -
it's a feature for them, not our responsibility to keep their systems
clean (however, we will mandate it for all staff accounts).

I do it with external logic - only mail for users that want scanning gets
sent through the mailscanner (I use sendmail with an external data
source to look this up). I can't see a problem with us declaring that
all our users get virus scanning, no option (it'd make our servers much
happier about losing all the new Bugbear crap), but the spam blocking is
the sticking part - many users are paranoid about losing any mail at
all, and I don't think a flat-file spam.actions.conf scales to 50,000+
mailboxes.

Potentially I may have to decouple the two functions, and run with a
standalone spamassassin utility. A pity, I'm really enjoying the
ease of mailscanner so far.

Barnaby
--
Barnaby Brown                            -              Systems Engineer
Pacific Internet (Australia) Pty Ltd     -     http://www.pacific.net.au