my other FREQ of the day

[Julian Field]

At 23:38 15/02/2003, you wrote:
>The three main weaknesses I see in mailscanner at the moment are:
>
>1) the dual queue approach combined with the "wait and see if anything
>arrived while we were asleep" approach to scanning messages

MailScanner 4 has multiple child processes all watching the queue, so the
response is very fast.

>2) its difficulty in working with certain mta's (it's not immediately
>obvious to me how I'd use it with courier, qmail, or communigate pro,
>and we're evaluating switching to courier or communigate pro ... but
>I'd like to stick with mailscanner)

It currently works with sendmail and Exim. Postfix is next on the list, but
that is going to take quite a while to write.

>3) somewhat related to #1 is that you cannot reject messages based upon
>results.  You can try to bounce them, after the fact, but that isn't
>reliable (because you cannot trust the return addresses).  I'd rather
>reject them outright.

That's your MTA's job.

>I have an idea that would solve all 3 problems, I think.
>
>Have an option for MailScanner to run as an SMTP daemon.

I don't mean to be rude, but sorry, there is no way that is going to
happen. I wouldn't trust it. Being an SMTP daemon is very hard, and the
MTA's are already very good at it. I don't re-invent the wheel.

>Am I the only person who would find that to be a useful direction for
>Mailscanner?  I could probably help some with implementation (in fact,
>I might even be able to convince my boss that it's important enough to
>our services that I could make it one of my front-burner projects), and
>I would definitely be able to provide a machine or two for testing.

Feel free to write your own email virus scanner :-)
--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
MailScanner thanks transtec Computers for their support