Introducing MailScanner to an existing Sendmail environment

[Antony Stone]

On Thursday 28 August 2003 11:29 pm, Steve Pfister wrote:

> I've got a sendmail 8.12.9 server (under solaris 2.6) that I've been
> maintaining for some time. I'd like to start using MS on this server, but I
> don't have a test server running (and would rather not have to set one up),
> and I don't want to disturb the users until I've had a chance to try it
> out. Is it possible to try MS on a small handful of test users?

Sort of, but probably not in a way you'd be comfortable with.

MailScanner sits in between two instances of sendmail - one of them receives
incoming mail and queues it for processing by MailScanner, and the other
takes mail from MailScanner after it's been processed, and delivers it.

Therefore all your mail on a particular machine will go through MailScanner.

You can certainly set up rulesets to tell MailScanner not to process certain
categories of mail (which match most of your users, thus only the handful you
mentioned will get the full treatment from MailScanner), but if you don't get
those rulesets right, then you may end up with mail not being processed the
way you want, which is not really the idea of a small-scale controlled test :)

The only way I can think it might work is if you can set up an additional
sendmail instance listening on either a spare IP address (if you have one or
can add one on the machine) or else a port number other than 25, and get this
sendmail to queue its mail for MailScanner, while the other sendmail just
carries on receiving and delivering stuff as normal.

You could then send your test mails in to the second IP address or the
alternative port without disturbing the mail server?

It really would be better if you could set up a test machine, though - you'll
be glad of the benefits when there's an upgrade to MailScanner, or
SpamAssassin, or your Anti-Virus engine, and you want to check how they all
work together, or how to configure new features, without disturbing your
users on the live server.

Regards,

Antony.

--

Ramdisk is not an installation procedure.