MTA preferences for use with MailScanner

[Mariano Absatz]

On Tue, 3 Aug 2004 18:46:39 -0400, Eric Dantan Rzewnicki
<rzewnickie at rfa.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 29, 2004 at 08:38:57AM -0300, Mariano Absatz wrote:
> > I heard, from knowledgable people, that both Postfix and Exim are
> > nice, easy to configure and have good documentation and mailing list
> > support... the only thing that I disliked was when Julian said that
> > the queue format of Postfix is binary and not plain ASCII... this
> > scares me a lot since, in a crisis, you aren't able to use your
> > average set of text tools to resolve it...
>
> Is this really true? I know postfix queuefiles don't have linebreaks in
> them, but does that make them binary?
>
> Anyway, postfix comes with the postcat utility which takes a queuefile
> and prints it to standard out nicely formatted with line breaks. So, you
> can do whatever standard text manipulations on it you desire. The
> postdrop utility is also useful for dealing with queuefiles.
>
There's more to mail queue files than the message itself... you
usually have the envelope, maybe including status info... I guess the
utility you name doesn't nicely print them... nor is there a utility
to reverse the process (or is it?).

Since MailScanner _needs_ the envelope info and has to rebuild it when
it finishes, it has no other route than mess with the binary files...

As to the 'standard' way of interacting with Postfix, I don't know,
but I suspect it is something similar to milter, that gets called for
every message...

The beauty and speed of MailScanner comes from the fact that it
batches quite a few messages ans processes all of them together,
invoking the virus scanner for all the attachments of all the messages
in one sweep thus saving loads of 'system' invocations for this...

Maybe I'm too used to zmailer, which uses the same model MailScanner
does (process interaction is mostly performed via the filesystem), but
I love it... if something's going wrong in some place I can stop only
one piece and let the rest keep working while I repair it...



--
Mariano Absatz - El Baby
el (dot) baby (AT) gmail (dot) com
el (punto) baby (ARROBA:@) gmail (punto) com

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