It seems that viruses CAN slip through MailScanner under high load!

[Mike Kercher]

I don't know all of the intricacies of MS nor the logic Julian that Julian
has programmed.  It seems to me that since MS picks up messages from the
queue in batches by individual child processes, only a child process should
hang.  What kind of hardware are you running and what kind of traffic are
you processing per day?

Mike


-----Original Message-----
From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf
Of Bret Hughes
Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2003 10:28 PM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: It seems that viruses CAN slip through MailScanner under high
load!


On Wed, 2003-08-27 at 21:22, Mike Kercher wrote:
> I *think* you can tune sendmail so that if the system load reaches 
> x.xx, it will stop accepting mail.  Might be worth looking into.  You 
> might also consider lowering the number of messages MS works with per 
> batch.  I believe the default is 100.  Try lowering that to say 30 or 
> so.
>

Interesting thread.

This assumes that the problem was load (probably was I admit)  but what
about a case where there is an issue with the virus scanning software that
caused it to not return.  No idea what that might be but I am supposing
here.

Is there a way to have mailscanner not send messages if they are not
properly scanned (ie. timeout)?  To me, the damage associated with allowing
viruses through vastly outways the delay of mail.


Of course in a busy shop this could get wild in a hurry and some sort of
notification, bells, whistles, sirens etc should probably go off in case no
one is baby sitting the box.

Just thinking out loud here.

Bret